Transatlantic Wedding

This week’s card is a commission I received from a friend for a wedding card.  The brief I had was that the bride is a New Yorker, the groom is Scottish, they are having their wedding celebration on the shores of Loch Ness, to blend a NY skyline into a Scottish theme and add their names.  Plenty to chew on there!  I love the challenge of trying to bring someone’s ideas to life.

It seemed sensible to start with the background, which I did by spraying card with a variety of Distress Spray Stains and Oxides.  I found a free SVG download of a New York skyline and cut that from vellum using my Cricut.  I’m not sure of the accuracy of the skyline but the Statue of Liberty adds enough clarity for the buildings to be a bit off.  Using the negative from the cutting as mask, I stencilled the buildings and statue.  I then added some wave tops by white heat-embossing waves from Inkylicious’ By The Waves stamp set.  Now imagine all that in orange and yellow tones instead of blue as I remade it to make the card brighter and coordinate with the castle!

For the castle, I used a pebble stencil, adding browns, yellow and purple inks.

Using my Cricut again, I cut the crenellations and then chopped the panel to make a wall and two turrets, adding some high and low lights around the stones.

You can see the revised background here, where I’m stencilling the Loch Ness monster – obviously! 

I used a Versamarker pen to heat-emboss some white wave tops where Nessie was emerging from the water.

I totally forgot to photograph the next stage which was to make a frame for the background.  I sprayed the same Mustard Seed and Picked Raspberry Distress Stains on a 8” piece of card and cut out a frame.  On the frame, I stencilled a little tartan pattern using Card Making Magic’s Traditional Tartan stencils and the sentiment from CCC’s Happily Ever After over the top.  The sides were embellished with gold heat embossed fireworks using MFT Fireworks stamps.

Now for the castle assembly.  I attached the wall using thin foam tape and then curved the turrets, attaching them with thick foam tape doubled up down the centre and thin tape at the edges.  A line of twine was tucked into each turret ready for the letters.

The final stage was adding the letters, cut using MFT Stitched Banner Alphabet dies.  The bottom of the castle looked a bit bare so I added die-cut Wildflowers by Lou Collins Text{ures} and a gold heat-embossed another sentiment from Happily Ever After.

Due to the dimension of the turrets, I had to make a ‘bouncy’ envelope to house the card.