Creating a Plaid Background

Happy Tuesday!
Anyone else feeling super tired?..man it was tough getting out of bed this morning.  I think it's because of my kitties...they all plot together to pin me in bed so they can stay there too...little stinkers.

But anyway!  We have a fun new challenge for you today at Tuesday Throwdown.  We want to see you add dimension to your cards!

While my card is a bit simple looking, believe me, there is a lot of dimension in there and it took quite awhile to put together :)

I really love all the plaid stamping designs that I've been seeing in the card world lately, but I unfortunately don't have large stripe stamps that I can use to do that design...and I really didn't feel like making a mask for every single stripe I wanted to make.  So I decided to just ink up a large chunk of paper and then cut it into varying size stripes.

I used 3 Stampin Up inks for this card - Tempting Turquoise, Brilliant Blue, Close to Cocoa, and Chocolate Chip.  Nice masculine colors :)  After I had all the strips cut, I set to work lining them up the way I wanted.  This is the part that took forever because in order to get the nice overlap that happens when you stamp these stripes, I had to weave all of those pieces of paper together....

But you know...all that work was worth it because I absolutely love the end result.  It turned out exactly as I wanted and I even had bits of those strips left over to make a few smaller versions of this card.  Can't complain about getting multiples done with one design!

To pull this card together, I cut out 3 of the bold Happy sentiment with my Silhouette and then glued them all together and adhered them to the card front.  Oh, by the way, the back of that whole plaid pattern has been covered in stripes of dimensional tape so the whole thing is raised up off the card base.

I stamped my Birthday sentiment onto one of the colored stripes and then lined it with a few others before flagging off the ends and adhering it below my Happy cut out.  I coated the whole big Happy with some Wink of Stella clear shimmer, and then a generous coat of glossy accents so it really shines.  I even added a few dots of glossy accents around the card just for some extra details.  And that was it!

I hope you enjoyed this card!  Give this technique a try!  I know it's much easier to stamp these, but the bright effect you get with using inked paper stripes is just so fun!

I'd like to enter this card into the following challenges:
    613 Avenue Create #158-Anything Goes/Birthday
    Creative Fingers #100-Anything Goes
    The Crazy Challenge #213-Celebrations

Thanks so much for visiting!! <3