Stamping Over an Inked Background!

Hi Everyone and happy Tuesday!!
I hope your weekends were fabulous and the week has started off with a bang!  We celebrated Matthew's birthday with friends on Sunday at our place.  It was fantastic and I'm thankful for those that came :)

We have an awesome color/image challenge for you this week at Tuesday Throwdown!  It's perfect for fall.  And our amazing sponsor this week is Winnie & Walter!!!  They have kindly provided materials for our team to use on their projects.

I chose the In Bloom: Addie's Garden stamp set for my project.  I adore all the giant flowers and can't wait to put more of them to paper!

To begin my card, I stamped all the leaves and the fun little flower/berry branch onto watercolor paper and heat embossed them in a gold and bronze powder.  Then did some really simple watercoloring by covering the image with water first, and just dropping my paint in the centers.  The clean water pulls the paint out and gives it a great fade.

While those were drying, I worked on my background.  I started by blending together Faded Jeans and Black Soot.  I really wanted a dark blue at the bottom but using just the blue wasn't getting it there.  You have to be careful when blending ink on watercolor paper though.  This type of paper doesn't allow the ink to soak in very quick, so it sits on top for quite awhile and if you rub too hard to blend the ink, you're just going to pick it back up.  So I did sort of a dabbing motion with the black and again with the dark blue over top of it.

Then added Broken China above the Faded Jeans and blended that out to a nice white at the top.  I felt the bottom needed a little bit more interest, so I pulled out a few of the words from Winnie & Walters Big & Bold sets and lined them up.

When you do tone on tone stamping, you can usually use the same ink that was put in the background like I did here.  I used the Faded Jeans color for my stamping.  You can see it gets a little hard to see at the very bottom where there is black as well.  But for the most part, when you do ink blending, you're not applying the full strength of the color.  So this allows you to stamp something that is at full strength and have it show up over those colors.  It's an awesome technique and really adds a lot to the projects!

To finish the card off, I cut out 3 layers of the Hello die cut from Winnie & Walter and heat embossed it with glittery gold.  A simple piece of twine was wrapped around everything and tied in a bow, and then I added a couple of glossy accent dots around the lower corners.  This has been a fun way for me to add a little more detail and dimension without too much bulk, or worrying that I don't have the right color of gems or sequins :)

I hope you've enjoyed this awesome card!  Give the tone on tone stamping a try and let me know in the comments below how it went for you!  I'd love to check your projects out!!

I'd like to enter this card into the following challenges:
    Addicted to CAS #72-Leaves
    Crafty Cardmakers #148-Make it Sparkle
    Simon Says Stamps-Die Crazy
    Winnie & Walter's Join in to Win 

Thanks so much for visiting! <3