Today’s card started with one idea, added another, and then finished with a third. It was rather a struggle putting it together, not because the techniques were hard, but because I kept running into mental roadblocks and making mistakes.

The background was done first, inspired by this pin on pinterest:

That part was finished fairly quickly. And then I ran into my first mental roadblock. I needed a focal image for the card. For some reason I felt I needed a round floral image, but didn’t have anything that really worked for me. So the background sat there for awhile while I worked on other cards.

And then I re-watched Bev Grey’s True Stamp class, and one of the things she used was technique tiles. I have some of those! So I dug those out, and happily colored one that was the right size to fit on the card. And then decided I’d use a rub-on on the colored tile. That didn’t work. Either because the ink was still slightly damp, or because the ink acted as a sealer, for some reason the rub-on wouldn’t adhere. So I flipped the tile over, and applied the rub-on to the reverse side of the tile, which didn’t have as smooth a surface as the front. Then I applied the color over the rub-on, because frequently rub-ons resist ink. Then I started wiping the excess color off the rub-on, and the rub-on started peeling right off the tile. Sigh. The mistakes just kept piling up.

After peeling off the rub-on, I was left with an interesting ghost image of the rub-on, but that wasn’t what I wanted, so I flipped the tile back over to the front. And then it occurred to me that I could use a partial image on the tile. A brief search through the stamp drawers led to my favorite butterfly stamp. I stamped it with versamark ink, and then applied white embossing powder to it. Which adhered to the ENTIRE front of the tile, because the ink STILL wasn’t dry.

Argh!!

Yes, it was one of those days.

I brushed the embossing powder off, and heat set the ink with my heat gun, and then stamped the butterfly in versamark, again, and added the embossing powder. This time it was mostly okay, so I heat set the embossing powder, and added the tile to the card.

Not one to leave well enough alone, and wanting to actually use some of the rub-ons on the card, I added a sentiment and a few doodles, and finally pronounced it done.

So what do you think? And what do you do when things go wrong? Feel free to vent in the comments!