Eye to the Telescope

It's a new year. The holiday decorations are put away. The house is quiet. The laundry is done. Something warm is burbling away on the stove, scenting the house with dreams of dinner stew.

These are the good moments in life. The ordinary moments for which we often forget to be thankful. But this is it... real life. And right now it's pretty damned good.

So, I'm thinking about love. Sure, the card maker in me is thinking about Valentine's Day, but my inner aesthete brings it back to love.

This is a technique that I like to use. I call it telescoping, but I've heard it called by other names. It's a simple technique, but I like how rich it feels.

I began by printing out two each of Fitztown's Valentine 1 and Valentine 12. You'll see the second finished card at the end of this post.

I then cut one each of the two different images that I'd be using for my main background and set it aside. (It doesn't matter what size the other two "working" images are.)

I stamped "Love" on the main image using a stamp from Stampin' Up! I also used a sponge to lightly ink the outside of the image.

I used a blender pen and ink pads to color in just a portion of the "throw away" image. There was no need to color everything since I only needed a 1 1/4" circle.

Moving on, I used a 1 1/4" punch for the image, and a 1 3/8" punch for the contrasting cardstock layer, and punched out both of those. (I love saying I punched something out. "What did you do today, Honey?" "Spent the afternoon punching out stuff." And that's how I get control of the TV remote.)

The only thing left to do was glue the layers together, being careful to line up the circle image to the background image.

Here's the other card that came from my telescoping adventure. This one I edged in Delicata gold ink and used the Anais Nin quotation stamp from Stampsmith.