Simon Says.......Make Your Own Background

It's Wednesday already, and that means a new challenge at the Simon Says Stamp Wednesday Challenge Blog!

This week our theme is Make Your Own Background!  No patterned papers unless you have altered them, please.  You can emboss, stamp, stencil, paint, spray, etc......have fun with this!!  The design team are using stencils or Gelli Plates to make our backgrounds.  If you have these, we'd love to see your work with them, too.  

I played with 2 different stencils this week and made 2 cards today, using some of the same elements.

I started this card by stamping the Penny Black Christmas Cottage on a white piece of cardstock, and coloring it minimally with markers.  Then I sponged on faded jeans and a little broken china distress inks to make the sky.  After making sure that everything was dry, I then attached my panel to the Simon exclusive Falling Snow stencil and used some modeling paste to make my snowflakes.  After more drying time, I attached my Impression Obsession birch trees and the included cardinals die-cuts to my card, and then stamped my sentiment (Hero Arts Miracle of the Holidays stamped in Red Royal mid-tone ink) on another panel of torn white cardstock and attached everything to a red card base.  I hope you can see the fun dimension that the modeling paste gives to my card; still quite mailable.

For this next card I used the same Christmas Cottage and a sentiment from the same set, but used this amazing Dyan Reaveley Let it Snow stencil:

This time I stamped my cottage on the left side of my panel, then sponged on faded jeans and salty ocean distress inks for the background.  Again, I colored the stamped image with red and green markers, and stamped my sentiment in the lower right in Red Royal ink.  Because of the placement of the cottage, I had to mask out a large snowflake from my stencil, but after that I just applied modeling paste to the stencil as I did above, lifted it carefully and sprinkled it with Hero Arts prisma glitter.  This took a little longer to dry, and it warps the paper a bit as it does, but after my card was completely dried and put together, I put it under a pile of heavy books, and that helped straighten everything out pretty well, without doing any damage to the stencilled image.

I plan to use these and various variations of them for my Christmas cards this year.  I hope you'll give these stencils a try - they are really easy to work with, and you don't have to use a modeling or embossing paste with them - they can be inked or sprayed for the same beautiful results.  

As always, our generous Heidi has provided us with another $50.00 gift voucher

to the Simon Says Stamp Store!

I can't wait to see what you make for us this week!  Have fun!