This weekend (before the head cold/flu bug from you-know-where set in) I did a little crafting and worked on the whole “brayer issue” again.

Here’s my second attempt at a card done with the brayer and sponging. I used all CTMH ink colors and played with them on scratch paper until I got the color I wanted. The blues are Indian Corn Blue, Crystal Blue, and Heavenly Blue. The greens are Sweet Leaf, Olive Green, and Garden Green. The leaves are Autumn Terracotta tipped with Goldrush.

I followed Michelle Zindorf’s post and created this card but made the following changes:

I tried using markers to color the leaves and the trees and have decided that I absolutely despise CTMH markers. My browns (the new style markers) have all gone a weird greenish brown color and they cause the clear embossing powder to clump up and look blotchy. Instead, I stamped the image in Versamark, then Chocolate ink, then used my pinky finger to tap off the Choc ink on the leaves, careful to leave the Versamark so the embossing powder would stay put, and then used the corner of my Honey inkpad to tap some color onto the leaves.

I decided that I didn’t like mine cut out in a circle, so I played around with my rectangle Nestabilities. The little tiny framed art looked lost on the card, so I pulled the cut out excess from the garbage bin and layered the framed part up on the “background”. I like how the “wind” stamp continues off the framed part to the background. I sponged the background edges to add more depth and pulled an American Crafts satin ribbon around the card and mounted it on a kraft cardstock from Archivers.

A tip: I did notice that after I brayered ink over the embossed images that they looked kinda blah, so I used a paper towel to carefully blot and pick up the color.