Quiet Snowy Neighborhood

First off, I can't believe it's been over a month since my last post. This third trimester has really been kicking my butt. I am just as tired as I was in the first trimester, but I'm not able to sleep as much due to Christmas prep, baby prep and general discomfort. Needless to say, I haven't spent much time in the stamping room.

Anyway, last night I did stamp! I signed up for one last weekly challenge on the SSUS group. We were to use Debbie Olson's sketch from this blog post. I read Debbie's blog everyday so when this came up as the challenge I had to sign up! I also decided to use color challenge 127 since I was going for a quiet snowy night look.

So here's the details. Let me start by saying that this was not a quick card to make. I would never consider making more than one of these. It seriously took me 3 hours last night.

I started by wheeling the Neighborhood wheel over watercolor paper. I inked the wheel up with Palette Noir black ink first so that it would be waterproof. Then I cut along the house line because I didn't want the clouds or birds in the picture. I watercolored the houses using a combination of watercolor crayons and ink pads (soft sky and blue bayou). I then set this aside to dry.

In the meantime, I took a piece of glossy white card stock and stamped the dots from Itty Bitty Backgrounds with VersaMark ink all over it. I gave this a few seconds to dry before brayering it with Blue Bayou ink. This gave me my snowy skyline, pretty cool no?

I then took some whisper white scraps and freehand cut wavy snow drifts through it using the rotary blade on the cutter kit and cutting mat. Then I used the 2-way glue pen to trace the waves and sprinkled dazzling diamonds glitter on top. Once the watercoloring was dry, I also applied glue to the roofs of the houses and sprinkled dazzling diamonds glitter on those as well.

Then I cut up the "snow drifts" into smaller pieces to cover the bushes and grass in between the houses. I wanted it to look like everyone had shoveled their walkways, so I couldn't just glue the drifts right across the piece.

I don't know if you can see it in the picture, but if you look closely at the edge of the roof, you can see the icicles I made out of crystal effects and dazzling diamonds glitter. Lisa Somerville has a great tutorial on this technique on her blog.

Finally, I was ready to adhere my houses to the sky. I used a ton of stampin' dimensionals to give a more 3-d look.

At this point, I just had to put the card together. The base is made of PaperTrey Ink's Stamper's Select white card stock. Then I stamped the Canvas background stamp on blue bayou card stock with blue bayou ink and tied Kraft Taffeta Ribbon around it before adhering it to the base of the card. I then punched a half circle out of the chocolate chip card stock layer with the 1 1/4" circle punch. Now it was finally time to cut my beautiful street up into thirds. This was, after all, a sketch challenge.

After checking my math several times, I used the Tabletop Paper Cutter to slice the street up. It was a little difficult cutting through all those layers (and dimensionals), but it gave me extremely clean cuts. I then glued each panel onto the chocolate chip piece, flipped it over and cut the half circle out of the top layers by hand. (It wouldn't fit in the punch due to the dimensionals.) I glued that layer to the top of the card and I was done!

I really hope that my challenge partner likes it!

Needless to say, I won't be participating in this week's bloggers challenge. However, several people are making cards that move, so check out what they've done by clicking on the links in my side bar.

Stamps: Neighborhood jumbo wheel, Itty Bitty Backgrounds, Canvas Background stamp
Ink: Palette Noir Black, Blue Bayou, Soft Sky
Paper: Watercolor Paper, Glossy White Cardstock, Blue Bayou, Chocolate Chip, Whisper White, PaperTrey Ink's Stampers Select white cardstock
Accessories: Kraft taffeta ribbon, Crystal Effects, Dazzling Diamonds, Stamping Dimensionals
Tools: 1 1/4" circle punch, Tabletop Paper Cutter, Cutter Kit, 2-way glue pen, Aquapainter, Watercolor Crayons