Have a cuppa with me?

This card is one of the cutest sets in the current Stampin' Up! catalogue....I have been a tea drinker for years and love stamps of tea cups and coffee cups (which can also hold hot water and a teabag!)  so this cute little set with coffee and tea cups really appealed to me.  It has several great greetings pertaining to coffee, tea, caffeine, etc. and I love the whimiscal style of the stamp art.

Of course if you know me, you know that I am not a clever and artisitic person BUT I have many wonderful friends who are both cleverl AND artistic...lucky me!  This card was inspired by my friend Connie Babbert from Worthington, OH...I saw a clever card on her blog where she had used the stacked up teacups image then masked it off and stamped a coffee pot from the Morning cup set behind it.  I was instantly in love and had to give it a try!  I wanted the image to fit inside the Embossed Tulips embossing frame (have you noticed I am using that on almost every card I've stamped lately?  Or you would if you attended my club meetings!) Anyway, things don't always work out as planned and as it turned out the coffee pot and cups took up too much space to fit inside the scalloped circle so I had to change out the coffeepot for the teapot but I still liked it.

This was one of the quick and easy cards we did at my Simply Stampin' class at the O'Fallon, IL library last month and everyone seemed to enjoy masking off the cups and making the pot appear to be behind the teacups.  If you have never done masking, it's a very simple trick to make an object appear to be in the foreground with another image in the background behind it. 

To get this effect, here's how...
1. you stamp the FRONT image first (yes, I know...it doesn't make sense but bear with me and trust me on this one), in this case the stack of teacups (all one image by the way) was stamped first on the carstock layer
2) you stamp the same image  again on a piece of a sticky note or post it note scrap paper.  You have to be sure to stamp so at least part of the image is over the side with the sticky but the image is on the front and the stick' um is on the back. 
3. trim out the image stamped on the post it note so that it's cut just inside the stamped lines...this prevents creating a "white space" around the masked off image in the finished project.
4. Cover the stamped image (in this case the teacups) with the post it note "mask" then stamp the stamp intended to be in the background(in this case the teapot) right over a portion of the masked teacups.  When you lift the stamp and remove the mask you will find a background/foreground effect with the cups in the front and the teapot in the back!  How clever is that?  I learned that little trick years ago but sometimes forgot to use the easy ideas.

While doing stamping demos at the Open House for the Scott Air Force Base Arts and Craft Center last month, I stamped, maksed and watercolored then and sponged and layered several dozen of these images.  I thought they would be cute to send to my son who is in the Air Force and currently deployed to a spot in the Middle East with none of those little Hallmark card stores handy....so I send cards for him to share with his fellow squadron mates or drop by the Chapel for the chaplain personnel to distribute.  Not sure what kind of sentiment I am going to stamp on them but whatever it is, I doubt that anyone receiving a card from a loved one deployed overseas will mind if I got the idea from my friend Connie. Try as I might, I couldn't find the post on Connie's blog with her version of this card or I would have shared a link...however please visit Connie's blog at http://www.inkspiredtreasures.com/ and have a look at the wonderful projects she creates!