What do you do when you are making a bunch of identical cards and you get an oops? Do you ignore it and use it anyway ? or do you throw the messed up one away ? I was working on some swap cards last week and being a little loopy from pain from my sprained ankle, I kept making mistakes. I had 2 cards where I stamped the first image upside down. Now you might say how can you make this kind of an error? Well, It was a flower head which could have gone up either way except my design had one of the petals pointing down to have the card images point down from the sides to the center and inverting placed a flat edge rather than a pointed one in the center. So I tossed the 2 cards off in a pile to make into some other design. Then as I was stamping my cards I somehow got ink on my fingers that transferred to the open area on my card front on two of the other cards Ugh!!

By the time I finished my Swap cards I had 5 partially started cards to figure out what to do with. My solution to the 2 where I got ink on my background was to fussy cut out the stamped images and place them on another card front. For the first one I took a piece of 4¼” by 5½” Rich Razzleberry cardstock and glued my stamped flowers on the front just below the center. Then I stamped the word Celebrate from the Love Sparkles stamp set(#143183) in Versamark ink, applied Gold Embossing powder and heated for a shiny gold celebrate title. I then stamped and heat embossed with white ink and clear embossing powder the It’s your Day sentiment from the same stamp set. After I added some gold star sequins – I had a card front to swap in general swaps at On Stage in April 2017 ready.
For the second inky oops I took another piece of Rich Razzleberry cardstock placed a white doily from the 2017 Occasions Catalog (did you know the doilies in the Occasions catalog are whisper white on one side and very vanilla on the other? very cool, huh!) on the front roughly in the center Placed my floral stamped image over the doily and stamped Thank you below in Versamark and heat embossed it. And voila 2 oopses became to card fronts to swap. Then on top a real challenge– in the card below I stamped the blue flower and realize it was upside down -Oops!- So this time to recover, I decided to place with different inks and a different layout. Like my previous cards I started with the Penned & Painted Stamp set, masked off my first flower, Stamped the pink flower, masked it and stamped the yellow flower masked it and stamped the 3 leaf sets. I then stamped the sentiment and sponged the top and bottom of the white panel lightly with cucumber crush ink. I decided to trim my card base to a narrow panel 3¾” wide, and  place a panel of Affectionately Yours Specialty Designer Paper behind it and centered it on a Crumb Cake card base.My last card for today was a sort of oops.  It is the result of trying out a few different blue ink combos for the layering (each of the flowers has 3 ink layers) I got the blue image inked and decided I like a different blue ink combo so it got set in my oops pile  For this card I decided to do some playing around with a different pink combo  to see how the sweet sugarplum ink looked as the midtone color rather than the light. I placed my leaves pointing down rather than to the sides, added the ladybug and some yellow flowers in the background. Then went looking for a sentiment and discovered the High Tide stamp set. Once I picked my sentiment i decided to use pieces of the lighthouse and moon to create a sunshine image behind the sentiment. I stamped off the sun and rays to give a lighter effect and dabbed some of the off the wide end of the rays to make it look like it was fading away. I liked the effect — what do you think?

‘Til next time…Happy Stamping!

~Kathy