You Make Me Happy When

...when skies are grey. I have been playing around with this idea for a couple of days and have finally gotten a chance to put it to paper. I used several PTI stamps to create this card: Up, Up, & Away (clouds and dies to cut them out), Hello Sunshine (the rays), Framed Out #3 (hello sunshine), and We Go Together (you make me happy...). I also used a Hero Arts polka dot background stamp and a banner from a WMS set. I used the sketch from the Sweet Sunday sketch challenge and  turned it for my design and The Little Red Wagon's Sentimental You challenge. I wanted my sentiment to be pop so I used shades of greys on everything but the sentiment panel. Vellum stamped with the smaller clouds created the wide strip as well as used it to back some grey washi tape so that it could become a banner. The clouds where stamped in white after I die-cutted them to soften the grey and then embossed with PTI's linen plate. I create my rays by alternating a single stamp off and a double stamp off of ink so that is blended into the background allowing my pieced together sentiment to really shine. I like how the rays look like they are coming out from behind the clouds (just like they do after a storm in real life...gives a since of hope).

For my sentiment I decided to play around. I knew I wanted to use the two lines from the song, but I wanted a little something more in the way of color. I first tried stamping them all in Spice Marmalade but it didn't look right. Then I played around with the rays by playing with different shades of yellow/orange. Once I decided that I really like the stamp off look using the same color I knew it was the sentiments that needed some tweaking. That was when I decided to create a third "sentiment" embedded in the two: Sunshine, you make me happy. To do this meant that I was going to have to use two colors on my sentiments. I stamped the larger one first by inking up with PTI's Smokey Shadow, then carefully (with a q-tip) wiped off the ink from the "you make me happy" phrase, and then stamping where I wanted it. I cleaned the stamp to ink up the phrase I left out with Spice Marmalade and used the q-tip again to wipe off the parts I didn't want inked. I then stamped over the sentiment on the c/s to place my now colored phrase in its place. I did the same thing with the smaller sentiment. Love how it plays off of each other now. As I was putting the card together I thought that the sentiment sorta looked like a patch so I added black faux stitching lines.