Bodacious Backgrounds

It's Wednesday, and you know what that means - time for the Techniques and Tutorial Team to step up to the plate.

Deb here today with a tutorial on background stamps. I love me a good background stamp cause you can always create designer paper (DP) in colors that match your project, even if you don't have a store-bought paper that works. I particularly love Eureka background stamps because you can often match up background images with focal images. Check out the project  below.

This card features Eureka's Filigree Background 39201 and Large Filigree Heart 24601. See what I mean by matching background and focal images?

Let me show you how his card came together. First of all, cut a base card from Stardream metallic cardstock at 5 1/2 by 7 1/2 inches - yup, that's a pretty large card. I like Stardream because it's substantial enough to hold up to the weight of multiple layers without sagging when you try to display the card.

I selected a piece of smooth, cream card, just a bit larger than the finished size I had in mind. After inking up my background stamp with black VersaFine ink, I stamped it off on a piece of scrap paper (to give a lighter colored impression) before stamping on the right of my cardstock. I try to line up my stamp with the paper keeping in mind where the actual image begins so I can place the second image pretty much in line with the first. And I repeated that whole process on the left. You can see the fine line between my two impressions. I try to do better than that but, in this case, that was good enough due to the card design I had in mind.

As you can see in the photo above, I cut a piece of Recollection metallic cardstock in a gunetal grey and decorated the bottom edge with Spellbinders Classic Edges 2. I then cut a 2 1/2 inch strip of the gunmetal paper the width of my cream background. I cut the scalloped border with the Spellbinder, and embossed the whole piece with a Cuttlebug Hearts folder. All layers were then adhered.

Another piece of the cream cardstock was stamped three times with the focal image, twice in Distress Worn Lipstick and heat embossed, and once in Distress Festive Berries and heat embossed with a sparkle powder.

I wanted to pop up my focal images so, as you can see in these two photos (above), I cut a heart with my Cricut from scrap card and traced a heart shape around my focal images then hand cut them.

I adhered the darker heart to a piece of the gunmetal card and hand cut around it to create a small border.

The two pink hearts were adhered to the card, and I used pop dots to attach the middle heart. A bit of ribbon and along with Liquid Pearl and glitter glue dots completed the project.

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Above is another project using the same background technique. This card measures 6" square. For this project, I used Eureka's Heart Background 57901, Love Potion Bottle 35802 and, for the inside, Cascading Hearts 14707

Below, you can see how the background and inside images looked.

That wraps up today's tutorial. As always, I look forward to your comments.

Don't forget to scope out what my Techniques and Tutorial partner, Joann, aka Sassy Raggedy has presented today on the QKR Stampede Blog. And remember you are always welcome at my personal blog Paper Crazy Lady. See you next Wednesday!