Muse 273 - Thanks

 I made these two card for this week's Muse Card Club, where Anita gave us this pretty inspiration:

I focused on Anita's:
-blended colours
-black elements and sentiment

As you can see, I ended up making two cards. This is my first time ever using Arches Cold Press Watercolour paper and I was having fun seeing how I liked it.

For the first card, I reversed Anita's idea of the blended stripe on the plain background. I masked a vertical stripe then created my blended background using Catherine Pooler inks. Wow do they ever blend seamlessly on this cardstock! I removed the mask right away, but still got 'fluffy' edges (not sure if that's the paper or the mask). Once it was dry, I stamped a branch from Wild Garden and a sentiment from Counting Blessings. Thank goodness for MISTI because I had to stamp over and over to get a black impression. I tried both Midnight and Versafine Clair Nocturne ink, both needed to be stamped several times on this bumpy, absorbent paper. 

For the second card, I created a horizontal stripe like Anita's, but with vertical blending. Or is that horizontal blending? Well, you know what I mean! lol!

I stamped some stars from Starlights and a sentiment from Spot On and then used the matching die to cut out the star and popped it up.

Overall, I loved painting on the cardstock, but I'm not in love with the creamy colour. I prefer a clean, crisp white. But the ease and result of the blending was amazing, so I'll definitely use it again, at least for that.

I used: