Day 3 of the Official We Love Dawn Blog Hop

It's Day 3 of our We Love Dawn Blog Hop!  It is my intention, although I'm not making any promises, to have at least one card each day of the week long hop. Today's card features a favorite stamp set created by Dawn called Give Thanks.  As a Kansas girl myself, the simple wheat stalks and the sentiment really speak to me. Dawn lives in Johnson County Kansas and I grew up there. I moved to Northeast Kansas not long before my 16th Birthday.  I lived in a very small town in an area that is predominantly farming related.  Although my Brother-In-Law farms, he doesn't plant wheat.  However, you can still see lots of it in Kansas, and particularly in Western Kansas. When I was a senior in High School, several of the guys in my class had been on Wheat Harvest and that was my introduction into that. My husband's twin brother even delayed college for a semester because he was away for wheat harvest somewhere in Western Kansas. Since Kansas is the largest producer of Wheat in the world, it's a symbol that represents home to me (and I'm sure it does to Dawn as well) so I have loved this set since it came out a year or two ago.

For my card, I had found some really pretty watercolor paper at Hobby Lobby with all this gold embossing on many of the sheets that looks like paint splatter and I thought of it right away when I pulled out this stamp set to make a card.  The thing is, while I liked the basic design and style of the paper, I didn't feel like the colors were intense enough for a "Dawn Card", so I did something that I like to pull out and use once in a while; I pulled out some of my color sprays.  I like to make my own using shimmer mist or glimmer mist of some kind and reinkers and I now have the rainbow spectrum.  I use a ton of Shimmer Mist and every time I empty a bottle, I set it aside because they have great nozzles and spray a very fine mist. So while I had Coral and Pink sprays that were already made, I needed to make a yellow color spray. I don't like all colors of yellow, but I do have a lot of affection for a warm kind of Tuscan yellow.  I made this using Summer Sunrise Reinker from Papertrey.  I didn't change the location of the three colors on the paper at all, I just intensified each color with a color spray that was more saturated and vibrant. A tip for you here: be sure to spray a few times on a scrap piece of paper to get the solution up into the nozzle so that it sprays correctly.  Those first few burst on a spray that hasn't been used recently will be pretty unpredictable in how they come out of the nozzle. And you'll need to let the paper dry thoroughly before you die cut it or heat emboss it.

Once that was dry, I die cut the heart shape using some Little B Stitched Heart Dies.  I cut one from the watercolor paper and one from heavy white cardstock. Once I had the cardstock cut, I laid the heart die cut into the white negative and put some post it tape on the back to keep it from moving.  That way I could line it up in the MISTI.  I stamped in Versamark and heat embossed using Antique Gold Embossing Powder.  With all the gold on the watercolor paper, I felt like the sentiment kind of got lost so I used a technique that Jennifer McGuire posted in a YouTube Video yesterday; triple or quadruple heat embossing.  This worked so well that I wish I had known about it before, but I will definitely use it again.  The secret to doing this and having it come out well, is stamping lightly each time. I used my powder tool, stamped it again, heat set that layer, put it back in my MISTI and did it again. Use your powder tool between each layer.  The heart and wheat stems on this card were done three times.  I also found that when I had embossed the wheat stalks three times, it made it very easy to get the die lined up for cutting. I stamped and cut those from the negative pieces of the heart to keep that same texture in the paper.

I cut a stitched rectangle from Gold Foiled Cardstock, and a slightly smaller one from more of the watercolor paper for the background panel and adhered those to a Melon Berry top folding card base.  I die cut a piece of fun foam in the heart shape one size down from the other to give it stability from behind. I arranged the wheat stalks and the acorns to the left of the sentiment and adhered them with Ranger Multi Medium Matte and finished off with some sparkle cognac sequins that I got a few years back from Cartwright's Sequins.

I hope you've been enjoying all the cards along the hop.  I'm ready to go check out the newly added ones that have been created.  Thanks again to Nichole for hosting the Link-Up at the Papertrey Ink Blog this week.

I forgot to say that I am linking this card up at the Double D Challenges who has a theme this time around of "Feeling Fallish".