A CASE of Happiness

October 24, 2024



If this card looks familiar it’s because it is a carefully made CASE of a card posted by the uber talented Martin Stone of @martinmayhem on February 4. His blog post on it is here. Instagram post is here.


You’ve probably had it happen to you where you see something and HAVE TO make it. I went so far as to get the retired stamp and die set, called Happiness Abounds, off eBay (very reasonable price, thank goodness) in order to make this card. Since then I have made other cards with the stamps and dies. I think if I were stuck on a deserted island with my craft supplies I'd take this stamp and die set with me, it's so good. 


One game-changing idea I learned from Martin’s Mayhem is how to alter a diecut to better match the color of your card. When you stamp an image on white cardstock, color it, and die cut it, you end up with a white outline around the image. Sometimes it works with your design and sometimes the white is just too stark. On this card, Martin colored the white outline with alcohol ink markers to fit in better with his card. Now I've started doing that (I used watercolor here) and I'm loving the results.



I stamped the flowers from Happiness Abounds (retired) on watercolor cardstock with black Distress Archival Ink and watercolored the inside of the images with Zig Clean Color Real Brush markers (I know Dull Blue was one of the colors). I used a waterbrush with Fossilized Amber Distress Ink to color the leaves, and then with Misty Moonlight ink to color the outside edge of the images, just before I die cut them. After this, I splattered the image with white ink. Specifically, I used Dr. Ph. Martin's Pen-White ink. I am splatter-impaired and both the black and white ink from Dr. Ph. Martin's allows me to use a small paintbrush to make tiny splatters with NO giant blobs falling on my paper. It dries super fast and I think I am "cured" from my impairment. 


I stamped the sentiment from another amazing SU stamp set called Good Feelings with black Memento ink onto 80lb white cardstock, and used one of the dies in the Happiness Abounds stamp set to get the spiral notebook edge at the top.


I assembled it to copy his card as best I could, adding lots of different bling when I was done. I was very happy with the results. Thanks, Martin. 


What I've used here :

Cardstock: Watercolor paper, 80lb Hammermill Premium Color Copy Cover, Stampin’ Up! Misty Moonlight

Stamps: Happiness Abounds (plus matching dies), Good Feelings, both by Stampin' Up!

Ink: Distress Archival Ink in Black Soot, Memento Black Tuxedo Ink, Distress Ink Fossilized Amber

Other: Zig Clean Color Real Brush Markers, Dr. Ph. Martin's Pen-White ink for white splatter.


Post a Comment