Hip Hip Hooray - Unity Friends with Flair

Happy January!  hahaha...

"Even overweight cats instinctively know the cardinal rule:  when fat, arrange yourself in slim poses."
                                                                 --------------John Weitz

Hi, Friends.......

Ugh...I've been on the sick and injured list all this week.  I came down with the bug on Monday and have been so sick all week....ugh..  Then that same day I took a nasty fall.....just stumbled on a chair leg like a clumsy old cow....and messed up my knee.....which was already injured from a fall a few weeks ago!  (What is wrong with me???)  I was in bed the rest of the day with my knee elevated and iced.  That helped a lot!!  I never thought I would want a joint iced, but it hurt so bad and swelled so alarmingly large....Eeek!  After the first few minutes it was blissfully numb, and I was very happy to have ice on it.  It is a lot better now...and quite colorful.  (Only crafters can appreciate the color palette of bruises, right?  Ha!!!)  I am so very grateful I didn't have to go to the doctor.

Today, for the first time, the bug I caught finally allowed me to be out of bed and actually doing something at my craft table...in between naps!  I knew I wanted to make a Unity Friends with Flair card and I had several ideas and techniques swirling in mind to try out for my card.  It didn't turn out exactly as I had planned, but it is a start.  To be truthful, I was so craft-starved that I wasn't going to be too picky about how things came together!  I just wanted to be at my craft table!!!  So, thanks to Unity, I dragged myself out of bed to make a card!  :)

I hardly ever pull out my gesso, but I knew I wanted to stamp on a gessoed surface.  I wanted the snowy look, but discovered an advantage of gessoing the cardstock was that my watercoloring didn't soak through at all.  Nice!!

I gessoed my cardstock and stamped the image (Unity - I Tweeted) in Memento - London Fog.  I painted the image with my waterbrush and Gelatos that matched the palette colors.  

Another thing I wanted to try was painting with Perfect Pearls.  So I went back over some of the areas with some new colors of Perfect Pearls by dipping my moist waterbrush in a coordinating powder and brushing over the area for some additional sheen.  This is the first time I had done this.  I love the effect!!  I will be experimenting with this technique more in the future.  I have LOTS of new colors of Perfect Pearls, since they are my latest obsession!!  :)


You can see the shimmer and shine from the Perfect Pearls in the angled photo below.....and the sparkle of glittery snow I added.

I pulled out my Unity - Hip Hip Hooray stamp and stamped it on vellum three times and heat embossed in white.  (Don't you usually say it three times???)  Beacon 3-in-1 seems to work well with vellum without much show-through.  That's what I have been using for attaching vellum lately.

Hope you like my card.  I have two new followers that will be introduced in my next post.  I just can't muster up the energy to do adequate intros right now....so I will sign off for now.....and try to get well.  Ugh...

[UPDATE:  Most of this post was written Thursday night.  Friday morning I am feeling quite a bit better!!  Yay...Light at the end of the tunnel!!]

<3
Janis

Thank you for the honor of entering this card in the following challenges:
1.  Unity Friends with Flair Link Up
2.  Word Art Wednesday Challenge #165 - Anything Goes
3.  Vandicrafts Artistry Challenge Jan 2015 - Anything Goes
4.  Simon Says Stamp Wednesday Challenge - Use Something New
5.  The Paper Girls Challenge #71 - Let's Sparkle and Shine