Hobbies
My Time To Craft Inspirational Post
Good day, fellow crafters. I am thrilled to introduce my inspirational submission for the My Time To Craft Challenge Blog, challenge #526, “Hobbies” theme. The design challenge is to show off your hobbies, for me, outside of crafting there is nothing more that I like to do than to scuba dive. As a certified master diver I have dived in many places around the world and while the locations may change the peace I feel under the water never does. I have included a couple of pics of me from a dive at the Atlanta Aquarium where got to swim with a whale shark in the gallery below.
For every challenge we, as the design team, attempt to bring you themes and ideas that will test your abilities and, ideally, ignite your enthusiasm to explore fresh ways of thinking. However, what I like most about being part of the team is seeing how we each showcase our take on the theme and sometimes just what the card means to the creator.
I hope you are inspired to enter this challenge and I can’t wait to see your creative take on this week’s theme. Be sure to tag me on your entry and/or comment below so I know to watch out for you. Remember Crafting is Happiness!
To create the background panel for this card I first began with a piece of homemade marbled cardstock. The technique to create this is really easy and produces some cool effects. You can use many different types of products to create it, like nail polish, or alcohol inks but I used a cheap acrylic paint from my collection. In the commercial world, they call this process hydro-dipping and generally use a pre-printed image that once put into the water the backing dissolves and leaves the image, then they slowly dip the item to be covered into the water which transfers the image. I carefully floated the colors I wanted on top of the water and then carefully dipped a white cardstock sheet into it. I then set it aside to dry.
After the panel was dry I used an unnamed die set from Globleland, featured left, to cut out my scene from black cardstock using my Gemini die-cutting machine. I then used Barely Art liquid glue to adhere it to the background. A word of caution, I usually use some of my acrylic blocks to weigh down my liquid glue adhere pieces and that works fine when the background panel is freshly made. If however you have had a panel that has been dry for a long time it is possible to get some cracking of the paint if you bend the cardstock very much.
I next aligned my background panel in my Misti stamping tool then used the Hero Arts Just Floating By stamp set, featured right, and some black ink to stamp my sentiment. While I would have liked to have a heat embossed sentiment on this card, the extra heat from the heat tool would not have interacted well with the paint. The last detail I added to the card was some mother-of-pearl flat-backed pearls to represent air bubbles.
The last step was to use my Hero Arts rectangular nesting die set, to first cut the background panel down to its final dimensions and then I followed that up with a slightly larger die and some blueish-purple cardstock to cut out a mat. I then used double-sided tape to adhere the background panel to the mat and then repeated the process to adhere the composite to a white card base. With that, I called the card complete.
Note: Please be aware that I don't have any sponsorship arrangements with the suppliers mentioned in this post; I simply appreciate and frequently use their products. To support the creation of more content like this, I've included affiliate links for some of the featured supplies. Utilizing these links won't incur any additional costs for you, but it does provide a small benefit to me, allowing me to continue sharing my work with you.
