Heart Art LTC

This is my card for Beetle's "Heart Art" LTC swap.  My card is called "Mechanical Heart" and I stole this card idea entirely from LROSEM's blog post called Comet Months.  I will go ahead and walk you thru it.

LROSEM said she starts with Watercolor paper.  I am out so I used Bristol; it is thick like Watercolor but smooth.  Take an old gift card and smear glue around and add pieces of paper.  Now, I have never used a plastic card like this and I kept spreading it to thin.  It dried super fast and you can see on the edges of some of my cards that the text pages are not attached everywhere.

You smear the glue under and over the text pages.  When the glue is dry you apply Gesso with the plastic card too.  Again, I think I should have used more Gesso simply because the next few steps didn't turn out as well as I hoped.

For the next part, I took an old sock and a Spun Sugar Distressed Ink pad.  I started off tapping the sock on the pad and rubbing the sock on the paper.  But after a while, I stamped the ink pad directly on the paper and used the sock to rub the ink around.  I was hoping that the ink would be a little darker.  Maybe I should have tried a different color.

Heart Art: Mechanical Heart

Then, you cut the cards to size and stamp your stamp.  That part was easy ;)  Now for the fun part.  You paint Tim Holtz Distress Crackle Paint (I used clear) on the cards.   My cards didn't crackle as much as I would liked.  I think the problem there was that I didn't use enough Gesso.  The Crackle paint comes in 3 colors-black, while & clear.  I played around with the other colors a little bit on my scraps.  I will have to use them on a future project!

Then I edged the cards just like LROSEM.  I wasn't really happy with the cards but sent them off anyway.  I went away on vacation for 2 weeks and looking at my extra cards again I think they are not to bad.  The background looks pinker in person.