Happy Birthday

Today's card is my entry into Simplicity's One Layer Wednesday challenge for this week. The challenge is always to use one layer of cardstock folded in half but this week the stipulation was to mask a background. I decided to try sponging for this since I've never done it before and I always like to try things once!

Here's my card:



The butterfly stamp is from an Inkadinkado set I bought recently. There's some cute little birdie stamps in the set too which I need to try and use sometime soon.

I also took a few photos and made up a short tutorial of how I made the masking for this card in the hopes that my trial and error can save others some hassles!

More Masking - Tutorial
Choose a piece of card stock that can be cut to fit the width of your selected cardfront. Begin by punching two squares/shapes next to each other at a respectable distance. I made mine 3/16" apart.

I wanted to make a 4" square card so I cut the width of the masking template to 4" across after using my centering ruler (where would I be without it?!) to work out the exact middle between the two squares.
The farthest this punch can punch into is 1/2" so I cut the length to 3 3/8" which meant I didn't have to worry about lining up the top sides of the squares, just the sides.

I then drew lines going down the left sides of both punched squares to the bottom of the template to indicate where the left edges of the punch should sit when punching my remaining two squares.

All of this measuring allowed me to just slide the punch straight up as far as it would go into the paper and use the pencil line guides to make the squares evenly spaced. Here's the finished mask:


(click on the image to see it closer)

Then it was simply a matter of applying some removable adhesive and choosing a colour to sponge on! Here's the sponging finished:


(click on the image to see it closer)

I lined up the masking template with the sides but eyeballed the top and bottom (I wanted it up slightly higher than the middle to make room for the sentiment).

To mask the stamp I wanted to use within the sponged squares I used the sponging template to trace around each square on a post-it to guide where to punch. I used a little bit of extra removable adhesive to make sure that it didn't move around at all when using it as a mask, and then stamped the design.

I added the sentiment and that was it! I hope this tutorial is helpful to someone out there. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments.

Size of card: 4" square

Supplies:
Card/paper - Quill white cardstock (+ a scrap piece for the mask template), post-it
Stamp - Inkadinkado "Flourishes", Hero Arts "Classic Messages"
Ink - Versacolor "Petal Pink", Versafine "Onyx Black"
Tools - Fiskars paper trimmer, Sullivans 1" square punch, UHU poster tack, makeup sponge

Challenge: OLW8