Pen and Paperie: Fishing Rod

My card today features two images, Fishing Rod from Nana Vic’s Digis and Large Fish from QKR Stampede.

It’s probably pretty obvious this is heading off to a fishing enthusiast and, in keeping with my theme of the year, I’ve gone CAS on the card, perfectly suited to a male card. To make up my card I’ve followed the current sketch at CAS(E) this Sketch.

I wasn’t sure how to make up the vertical elements until I saw the current challenge at Country View was to make your own background. I thought I’d check out Tim Holtz’s blog for some inspiration and found it with this month’s tag and the technique remix. For my monoprinting I’ve used a stencil that reminded me of a fishing net and for my embossed texture paste Tim’s Measured Layering Stencil as fishermen are always talking about the size of their catch. I wasn’t sure if Distress Embossing Powder would work for the embossed texture paste technique but it did and gave a lovely rough finish.

While checking out the embossed texture paste technique I really liked the shiny black stamping Tim did. Unfortunately I didn’t have a fish stamp in my collection and no time to order one in so I improvised by using black foil over my digi. It’s not something that photographs well but in real life it looks lovely and shiny. Just to make things easy for myself I decided to use the same technique on my fishing rod in multiple colours, lots of fiddly layering up of foils later and I was really pleased I’d made the effort. I coloured both images with Tim Holtz Distress Markers.

When I foiled the fish I really liked the relief image that was left on the foil so I cut around it and placed it on some card I swiped with Distress Inks in various colours and popped it on the inside of the card. A nice way to tie the inside to the outside and add some interest to it, not to mention use up what would otherwise be waste.