Cheers Dad!

Today is Father’s Day in the UK and you may recall my Father’s Day inspiration for my Visible Image DT post at the end of last month.  I had my Dad in mind when I made that one.  However, I needed another card for my Father-in-Law so here’s what I created for him.

My plan loosely involved beer bottles and a wall but I decided to add a cat peeking under the wall.  This is exactly what our youngest cat, Dill, would be doing.  I marked in pencil where the stencil bricks end and added a bit of sticky note to mask then stamped the cat from Curious Cats.

Whilst I had that set out, it occurred to me that the whiskers would make rather good grass so I stamped that along the bottom edge.

Before stencilling the brickwork, I lightly blended some brown ink so that the mortar lines wouldn’t be stark white.  Then I blended terracotta ink through Distressed Brick stencil.

To give the bricks some texture and interest, I mixed a small amount (which was still way too much!) of Distress Grit Paste with some terracotta reinker and applied in patches through the stencil.  I removed the stencil and washed immediately in hot soapy water.

Whilst the paste was still wet, I added pinches of green, grey and gold embossing powder and then heat-set it.  I love doing this with Distress Paste as it gives such fabulous texture.

Once the panel was dry, I stamped some more grass and embossed with the green powder I’d used on the wall but I forgot to photograph that.  I gold heat-embossed CHEERS! from Bring On The Beers at the top of the panel and three small bottles on the wall.  Two of the middle sized bottles were stamped on a scrap of card and I also ended up stamping one of the large bottles too.  These were all clear heat-embossed so that I could colour them with Copic markers.  The medium and large bottles were then fussy cut.

To disguise any unevenness in the cutting, I flipped the bottles over and went around the edges with a black Sharpie pen.  This also gets rid of the white edge.

The card was finished by gluing the medium bottles onto the card and attaching the large bottle using foam tape.  The sentiment, from Time To Par-Tee was gold heat-embossed on black card and attached with foam tape.  Black and green mat layers framed the panel perfectly and then it was mounted on a square card blank.