Hey there, Pinkfresh friends! It's Angela, back to share a card that I made for this month's challenge. The theme for August is stripes, and many crafters who know me know I LOVE a good striped card! I've also incorporated a few new products from the July release. It's been so much fun playing with the full Sweet Friend Floral set - the stamps, dies, hot foil plate and stencils. For today's card however, we'll just focus on the stamp set.

I began by creating my background panel using the thickest stripe in the Pop-Out Gradiating Stripes Cling stamp set, alternating colors. A cooler-toned palette felt right for this card, so my ink selections were Soft Lilac, Lavender, Tidal Pond and Sky Blue.

Once my stripes filled the panel, I did something that my earlier card making self would NEVER do: I cut my stamps! The flower images in the Sweet Friend Floral stamp set come all as one piece, and the same is true for the die and hot foil plate. On this occasion, I wanted the flexibility to be able to lay the flowers on my background panel in a way that allowed them to curve around each other, so I cut them apart, positioned them in my stamping tool, and heat embossed them in white over the stripes. My tip for this is to ensure you've let the background stripes dry completely before moving onto the embossing, and use an anti-static powder tool to wipe the striped panel to prevent excess white powder from sticking to it. (Those little unwanted bits can be hard to see until after they're set!)

Moving on to the sentiment, I heat embossed the 'sweet friend', as well as the smaller 'thinking of you' in white on Concord & 9th Peacock cardstock. I love this particular color because it coordinates so well with Pinkfresh Studio Tidal Pond ink. Again, wiping that surface with an anti-static powder tool is key to getting rid of excess white embossing powder.

I cut my sentiment into a square and layered it on top of a slightly larger vellum square, securing it to the background panel with foam tape. After trimming a little bit of the excess off the right side, I mounted the whole thing to my A2 card base and finished with a few small metallic silver pearls.

I hope this card has encouraged you to think about some of your single-piece stamps in different ways, and perhaps has also sparked some ideas for the August challenge. I can't wait to see what you create. Thank you so much for stopping by!

- Angela