Topflight Stamps 4th Bday Blog Hop

It's Topflight Stamps' 4th birthday!  They are celebrating with a fun blog hop, and they invited me to hop too - how fun is that?! If you're not familiar with Topflight Stamps, I hope you'll check out their site - they carry hard-to-find and beautiful products from all over the world, bringing them to one place so we can buy them soooo easily. 

They're heroes.

Today, I hope you'll enjoy the hop! Everyone has made a beautiful project or two with a birthday theme to celebrate. If you're already hopping, you should have arrived here from Jennie Atkinson's blog. If not, you might want to start at the Topflight Stamps blog to take it from the top!

I have 2 cards to share, because I got excited about the choices! 

I thought a "Make a Wish" theme would be fun for a birthday celebration, so I went down a rabbit hole of dandelion stamps - there are some gorgeous sets as well as a few of my favorite Lavinia fairies to choose from!  I began by layering in the dandelion images from this gorgeous Hobby Art set in pale hybrid inks, building up a moody background. I sponged and watercolored from the bottom edge to ground the scene, then added more stamping in darker colors to build up the foreground. I tore a piece of junk mail to create a mask for the ground and brushed grey ink along the bottom.

The darker stamping is done with Versafine Clair ink in grey. On the centers of the dandelions I dotted with a paint pen and then with acrylic paint for a little brighter effect. If you were holding the card, you'd see where I made a little glitter trail where she's blowing - it's very sweet and sparkly and hard to photograph! 

I added a little curve to the banner - and I love that tiny little seed floating above the 'i' in wish! Beautiful stamp set.

While I was looking at Lavinia stamps, my jaw dropppppped at the sight of this gorgeous moth stamp, so I had to have it too - I'm recently obsessed with moths, especially these beautiful and rare lunas, and the detail on this stamp is just fabulous. This is a slimline card too (3.5" x 8.5") so you can see it's a really large image as well!

I stamped the moth in Versafine Clair ink and embossed with clear powder, then misted the panel with water and did a broad watercolor wash. To add texture to the painted area, I laid a piece of bubble wrap over the paper for a few minutes... normally I'd let it dry overnight but I didn't have that much time! It still added some neat texture to the background. (If you'd like to see a tutorial with more ideas for that technique, I have a really fun one HERE.)

I added a little shadowing with a Copic marker and some colored pencils to pop the moth a little. The sentiment is from a block of birthday sentiments made by Darkroom Door, another favorite company! 

Topflight Products I used:

Hobby Art Stamps - Dandelion Wishes

Lavinia Stamps - Josie (fairy)

Lavinia Stamps - Indra (luna moth)

Darkroom Door - Happy Birthday

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NOW for the fun stuff!! Of course, it wouldn’t be a birthday celebration without prizes! 

Topflight Stamps is giving one lucky winner a $100 Gift Certificate to the store. But wait, there is more, each stop on the hop (even mine!!) has an additional $25 Gift Certificate up for grabs for some lucky commenter. For a chance to win, make sure to visit every stop on the hop and leave a comment by March 29th. Winners will be announced on the Topflight Stamps blog on March 31st. Good Luck!

If you can't wait to shop, go nowwww - the entire store is 20% off!

From here you'll be hopping on to Kathi Rerek's blog - thank you for visiting me today!