Civil War Card and Variation

The real reason why I became interested in photo stamps (March 6, 2013 blog) is seeing a fabulous Civil War card on YouTube done by Kate Palmer. She gives quite detailed directions about her process and I became obsessed with owning the Civil War soldier stamp by Oxford Impressions. I also had to have the Cuttlebug Script embossing folder and a few other supplies before I could finally try to create my own version of Kate's card.

I began by stamping the soldier image using several colors of dye inks before deciding on one. I used DI to further "age" him. I colored a piece of manilla CS with Vintage Photo and Walnut Stain DI, embossed it with Script, then added more Walnut Stain DI to the raised images.

I gathered my embellishments to complete the card.

Recently I picked up the Tim Holtz Tattered Pinecone die on clearance because I had watched one of his videos showing how to use the die to make roses. There is a real learning curve to making them, and most of mine have come out quite lopsided. It begins with a spiral cut piece that you roll and fluff out. Easier said than done! They still don't compare to the real ones I got for my birthday (right).  At any rate I finally came up with several that actually resembled roses.

Another minor obsession I had was with a Tim Holtz tag featuring a little girl that really reminded me of my niece, Lindsay. It was used to demonstrate how to tint a black and white photo using Distress Ink. I thought he must have used a stamp because I saw other people using the same image in their projects. Imagine how exited I was to find that Tim shared the jpeg image of her so I quickly printed out several copies and began photo tinting. 

Finally the roses and little girl came together in a card that was inspired by my Civil War card.

Lindsay was just in from South Carolina so a made her a bookmark using her look-alike! A faux relative for my real relative!