CFC #92: Wallpaper, and A Study in: Stripes

So excited for my first CAS-ual Fridays Challenge post as a Girl Friday! To celebrate, I made a few additional cards using the same stripe stamp, included later in this post. The challenge this week is to create a stamped background on your card. 

For this challenge I used the stamp with the three lines (right under WTF) to make a one-layer card.

The line stamp reminds me of the lines in a UPC bar code, so I thought I'd make one with a custom happy birthday sentiment. I showed it to my husband, and he said UPC codes have numbers in them, not letters. Bah humbug. Creative license, my darling!

I printed the sentiment from Word (added a space between each letter) and then made two rectangular masks to put over "happy 32nd" and "birthday."  The long masks for the lines on the top and bottom came in handy too. Then I opened all my ink pads and just started stamping down the color wheel.

  

I've been stamping for many years, but had never known about the Fiskar's stamp press until watching a Papertrey video recently. It almost feels like cheating! To be able to stamp with right angles and parallel lines every time ... heaven! 

While I had the mask all set up I printed off some more card bases for upcoming birthdays, and stamped more rainbow bar codes. I did one in blues for a man (rear right) and one in grays with a pink section pointing to the age (front right). This would also be a fun set to give someone too if you make different color combos and take the age off.

Here's another card using the same stripe stamp. The stamp press is great at helping you match up the ends of your lines when you need to stamp across the base. I just used two inks on this one, pink and blue. The lighter colors are from doing a second generation stamp. This helped to give a little more dimension, and also speed up the process since I didn't have to re-ink each time. "Sweet Friend" is from the new Beanstalks set.

Here's a quick one stamping the lines through a circle I punched out of copy paper. "Just Thinking about YOU" is from the new Only You set.

Finally, my favorite card. Here's the start of it. I cut out a 1 1/4" wide rectangle out of copy paper to make a mask for the lines stamp. Then started stamping rainbow colors across the card base. 

Here it is a little farther along, with the stamp press and mask to the right.

I stopped at this point and grabbed some circles from my scrap basket to see what it would look like as a card. Kinda cool already! Also, I figured if I messed up later I could just show you this card for the completed one : ) But let's finish it up ...

I was super happy with how the "wallpaper" turned out, but when I came to putting the sentiment on I was stuck. Everything I tried competed too much with the background. So finally it hit me that I needed to do a white on white sentiment. And then I was happy with it.

Thanks for sticking with me. I promise future CASual Fridays posts won't be as long, but I was incredibly excited about the whole thing and wanted to do something special.

I sure hope you'll join in the fun at CAS-ual Fridays, where there is a $25 gift certificate to Ellen Hutson for the winner! Also, stop by to check out the new design team and their fabulous creations : )

Thanks for looking!

-Kelly