The adorable little gnome with her poinsettia is from Trinity Stamps’ From Our Gnome To Yours stamp set. I created this card for an Instagram hop with the theme Single-Layer Card. Because it had to be a single-layer card, it took a couple of tries to get right. But in the end I think it came out OK.

Background

The first thing I did was to die cut the little gnome from white cardstock to use as a mask on the background. After a couple of tries I figured out the right order for my hot foil sandwich. I used the Spellbinder’s Hypnotic Background Glimmer Foil Plate. This gave me a pretty dotted background with a gap for my gnome.

I also used the mask for ink blending. For my ink blending I used Distress Oxides in Chipped Sapphire, Prize Ribbon and Tumbled Glass. I blended them from dark to light with the lightest color around the gnome mask.

As an aside, if this weren’t a single layer card, I wouldn’t have needed the mask at all. I would have foiled and ink blended right over the entire background. Then I’d stamp and watercolor the gnome on a separate piece of cardstock. Probably watercolor paper, actually. After watercoloring, I’d die cut the gnome and pop her up with some foam tape. This die set includes dies for the sentiments as well. So I’d just stamp them on cardstock and die cut them. Easy-peasy!

Focal point

That took care of the background. The next step was to stamp the little gnome in the gap I had created with the mask. I stamped her with Ranger Archival Ink in Coffee. Then I watercolored her with my Tim Holtz Distress Watercolor Pencils.

Did you know that the remaining Distress colors will come out in the watercolor pencil line toward the end of January? I’ll definitely get them because I love the pencils that have come out so far. I’m looking forward to getting all the colors that I’ve been missing from the palette.

When the watercolors had dried thoroughly, I stamped and heat embossed the sentiment twice in gold for extra dimension. I still felt that it was hard to make out the text, so I went in with a Sakura fineliner in sepia and added a shadow.

I also used a white Sakura Gelly pen to clean up any smudges around my gnome and added back some detail with the fine liner. My plan originally was to re-stamp the feature image, but I was worried that I might mess it up and have to start all over. So I sketched in the detail I felt was missing.

Assembly

Because this was a single-layer card, assembly was very easy. I just cut down the card front to 4” by 5.25” and glued it directly to a white Ohuhu card base. The final touch was some gold Stickles in the center of the poinsettia flower.