Heard You Were Under The Weather Card

In my Thursday night writers group, there is a lovely woman named Alice. Alice is, let us say, of a "mature" age, and quite the spitfire. Her eyes sparkle and dance with merriment and her smile twitches as she more often than not brings the comic relief. To say it simply, Alice rocks my world. The group just wouldn't be the same without her.

Unfortunately, Alice also has a number of health problems, and is currently recouperating from one of these at a local hospital. I decided to make her a Get Well card and bring it to the meeting tonight so that we can all sign it and send her our best wishes.

I didn't have a stamp that seemed quite right though, so I decided to take the plunge and try out one of those digital stamps, or digi stamps as they're often called. Have you ever tried them? Basically, it's just an image that you purchase for a one time low fee, download it to your computer, and you can print it out on cardstock as often as you like. The one I bought cost $3 from AllThatScraps.com, called Sugarplum's Rainy Day Emma. You can find it here: http://www.allthatscraps.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=899_1130&products_id=11459&zenid=d904f640f93a43c3c62c4267f55082a5 The image comes in a zip file, which you can open just by clicking on the image, then clicking "open". Pretty self explanitory. I do recommend saving two copies -- an original and one to play around with sizes on. All in all, I was very pleased with how easy it was to use. And it came out pretty nice. See for yourself.


Not bad, huh? I printed it out on Georgia Pacific (Walmart brand) cardstock and colored it with my Copic markers. I was concerned about the printer ink bleeding, and it did a little. You can see it on her forhead between the part in her bangs, and also on the lapel of her jacket. That was the only two places though, so I'm not sure if it was just because the ink wasn't quite dry or because the paper was too saturated from the markers or what. If anyone has any tips on not smearing, I'd love to hear them. Maybe next time I'll let the ink dry for a half hour or so before coloring and see how that goes.

Okay, so for supplies, I used: notecard and envelope from Craft Essentials, patterned paper by My Mind's Eye, which I punched with my Fiskars threading water border punch. Digi stamp from All That Scraps, Copic makers, and ribbon by American Crafts. The sentiment, I actually just typed and printed out on the scrap cardstock using Microsoft Works... I can't remember the font I used, but I can find out if anyone wants to know. It's not straight intentionally. For some reason I thought that cutting it sort of squiggly would add dimention, but I'm not really sure that it worked all that well.


Notice the flowers in her pocket? I actually just drew those free hand. I wanted to add a pop of color on her raincoat and thought about paper piecing the pocket, but decided to do this instead. Knowing that the Copics would smear with my ink pen, I drew the flower petals with the edge of the brush tip first, then outlined them with my Pilot Precise pen. Smart thinking, eh? I was quite proud of myself. Then I just cut them out and attached with a mini glue dot.

Copics used are as follows:
skin - E00 (skin white) and R02 (flesh)
hair - E33 (sand) and E57 (light walnut)
jacket - Y11 (light yellow) and Y15 (cadmium yellow
pants - B21 (baby blue) and B06 (peacock blue)
boots - RV11 (pink), R22 (light prawn), R27 (cadmium red)
umbrella - BV00 (mauve shadow) and BV08 (blue violet)
grass - YG03 (yellow green), G24 (willow), and G05 (emerald green)
sky - BG10 (cool shadow)


So right now I'd rate the digi stamp performance at a 9. I love that I can use it over and over with just the click of a button, there's no cleanup, and no storage space taken up. The only negative was that little bit of smearing, but hopefully I can figure out why that was and find a way to avoid that next time.

Thinking of sharing a poem tomorrow. Not sure that I'm ready to expose myself like that, but we'll see. Hope you all have a fantastic evening!