A Lesson in "Making It Work"

Hi all! Thanks for stopping by again! Today's post is all about making lemonade out of lemons.

A few weeks ago, I started a card front as a part of Kathy Racoosin's coloring challenge. I wanted to try watercoloring be used it had been a very long time (like since high school) since I had done any major watercoloring. I can tell you it is not like riding a bike for me! In high school I remember loving water coloring and made this awesome picture in art class which now hangs in my cube at work (See pic below).

Thinking that it's just like riding a bike, I decided to pull out my water color paper, stamping some images and then watercoloring them in. Nothing to it, right? Haha!

I pulled out some of my favorite flower stamps from the Zen Floral stamp set by Honey Bee Stamps and was going to use my Arteza pens to water color with. First, I stamped the flowers with brown Memento Ink in a circle, then I pulled out Arteza pens to color the flowers. I wet the paper slightly so I could do a wet on wet technique and that's where things headed south.

Once I had the paper wet, the ink started to bloom. In the end, I realized two things: 1.) I stamped with the wrong ink (I always mix up which ink to use for watercoloring! Doh!) 2.) I think the watercolor paper I was using wasn't the best quality. Both of these things caused everything to spread quickly. I say this because when I added the color to the flowers, the ink ran everywhere too. Eek! I really didn't want to scrap the card and for some odd reason I could hear Tim Gunn say "Make it work!" I still liked the idea of the card so I just ran with it! I figured it would just be a little more flowy! After the flowers dried I went back in and washed the background with one of my light blue Arteza pens to create the faded background. Due to how I stamped the flowers, there were gaps and I needed to make it feel more like a wreath. To do that, I took my brown Cricut pen and drew lines connecting the flowers to each other. Then I stamped "You Are Precious" from a Neat and Tangled set I have. I still didn't feel like the wreath was complete yet so I added Nuvo drops in Blue and copper to make it feel like there were berries and buds attached. I then attached the piece to a 5.25x5.25 Lawn Fawn Plaid paper and attached it to a 5.5x5.5 white card base.

As I was working through the card I was frustrated that it wasn't going as I had planned but I heard Kelly Latevola's voice in my head say, "It looks like a disaster now but just wait! It gets better!" And after working through it, I learned a bunch of things as well as actually like how the card turned out. It's perfect for my friend's birthday card as she loves nature and enjoys the free flowing feel.

Lastly, I created an envelope to fit the card, stamped more of the Zen Flowers from Honey Bee Stamps and colored it in with my Arteza pens. The envelope isn't a perfect match to the card because the envelope paper isn't watercolor paper so I couldn't fade out the colors, but I still think it's cute!

What do you think of the card? Have you ever messed up and kept on working through the issues and come to love what you created? I'd love to hear about it. Tell me about it below!