A Nautical Wedding Card

The Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge Blog's theme for this week is Nautical/By the Sea. I don't really have any beach themed stamps or dies but whenever I think of Nautical, I automatically think of a Naval Officer's Uniform, Sailor Dresses, Sailor's Suits, Sailor's Knots and even a few Sailor's style outfits I've had through the years.  There's some interesting information on Wikipedia about this style that came to be popular for women and children in the 20th century.  For this card I naturally got out my stash of Navy Blue and Gold Striped Paper. Sadly, this is the last piece of it.  I have a little left from the Diagonal Stripe but only enough to use on maybe two cards.

As I sat and looked through my stamps and dies, I didn't have the one thing I really wanted for this challenge — a compass. So I went to look for one on the Internet and found one in some free clip art.  I had to pull it into my photo editing software to fix the rotation, but I remembered how to do that without too much difficulty. This image was just what I wanted. I tried to print it from Microsoft Word, but that didn't work. When I opened it in Windows Picture Viewer I could tell it to print from there, what kind of paper I was using (Stamper's Select White Cardstock) and it also allowed me to print at 600 dpi for a presentation quality image.  I've tried to print on Cardstock before without success so I was excited to notice these setting as available in that program.  I'm using an HP Inkjet Photo Printer that I've had since we moved to Oklahoma more than 6 years ago. The printer before this one was also an HP Inkjet Photo Printer.

Once I had the compass image printed, I cut it with the 2nd largest My Favorite Things Stitched Square Stax Die.  I cut the striped paper in the largest square die from the same set. I cut a white strip wide enough for the greeting from the Simon Says Stamp Congratulations Stamp Set.  I stamped that using Versamark and heat set it using Simon Says Stamp Gold Embossing Powder. I wanted the little bit brighter gold to match the stripes on the patterned paper. Once I had that stamped and heat set, I went around the edge of that piece with my Versamark Cube and then put the same gold embossing powder on it and heat set it to have the gold all the way around.

I made a mat for the sentiment by using my die creatively with a small scrap of the navy & gold paper.

I used some Navy grosgrain ribbon to tie a Sailor's Knot around the panel with the compass on it. To get it to lay flat I had to cut it in half at the back and tape the ends down.  The knot on the front was positioned and then adhered with Ranger Multi-Medium Matte for a good strong hold. I set a few acrylic blocks on top of that for about 5 minutes so it wouldn't budge. I assembled the card onto a top folding A2 Night of Navy Cardstock Base. I adhered a white die cut panel on the inside of the card for a place to write a sentiment.

So now y'all see how my mind wanders when I am creating a card, but it definitely works for me most of them time.