The Road Less Traveled - a swap card

Happy Monday,

A bit late I know, but I hope your Monday has been a good one.

We have had a tremendous downpour here, the rivers and streams are in spate and the road nearby was flooded for a time but it has cleared now. Other parts of Scotland have also been even more badly affected by the wet stuff, so I hope everyone in Scotland reading this has escaped the worst of the flooding.

Recently I've posted a few projects that were using up the bits and bobs left over from a swap card I'd made. Well, the card has now been received so I can reveal it here.

The challenge for the swap was to incorporate dots and/or spots and as you can see I've used an white embossed square card with lots of dots (Papermania) as the base and added two toppers - one with even more dots - some created with bubble-wrap and paint and the others with a stamp from Stampin' Up - Dot, Dot, Dot - VersaMark and silver mica powder. The paint used is Adirondack paint dauber Juniper and Pebeo Bermuda). When dry this was overstamped with pine trees in a dark green ink (Versafine Olympic Green). The embossed edging is more of my homemade 'frantage' using several colours of embossing powders (UTEE Platinum, Papermania white and silver, WOW Blueberry Regular) with a couple of shades of glitter( iridescent white and pale blue glitter) sprinkled in to the mix.

The sentiment is a Robert Frost quote that means a lot to me personally and I was delighted to find that Our Daily Bread had created a stamp of it. It has been stamped in the dark green ink and heat embossed with clear powder. I've edged the topper with some of the silver embossing powder and even sprinkled some 'frantage' style over the top.

The stamping on the inside and back uses the second generation of ink, i.e. I've inked the stamp, stamped once on copy paper and then again on to the card, not wanting it to be too pronounced.

The ribbon is American seam binding from Ribbon Carousel and the aqua rainbow drops are from Crafty Notions.

As I type, I can see the EM out in the garden replenishing the seeds in the feeders and trays. He is taking heed of Monty Don who mentioned in the last episode of Gardener's World that once you start to feed the birds you have got to keep it up. This is, as he explained, because our feathered friends expend a lot of energy simply flying to the feeders so if there's no food there it takes them a long time to recover, especially if they have to fly around looking for another source of food.

I've been to our health clinic this morning going through my annual glucose tolerance trial test. For those of you who don't know what this entails, and may be curious, this test requires that I fast from 9pm the night before, have a blood sample taken early morning then drink a glass and a half of glucose powder dissolved in water  ... yuk! I then have to sit in the waiting room for 2 hours - 2 whole hours of inactivity - using no energy at all - bored out of my skull!!! - before having another blood sample taken. All I can say, thank goodness it's over for another year :)

I'm off now to the craft space ... the Scrapbook Remix course has got me on a roll. There's an almost completed scrap page on the desk - just the title to add and then I can take a photo. I'm never going to be the fastest of scrappers but I'm certainly speeding up as a result of what I'm learning.

If you've got this far, thanks for sticking with me and getting through my ramblings.

I wish you a good evening and happy crafting,