Hope and Strength Breast Cancer Awareness stamp set

I love the way Stampin' Up! is always helping to support causes near and dear to my heart...starting this month and lasting thru August 2011, they are featuring the Hope and Strength stamp set.  It's a beautiful set all by itself but even nicer is the fact that Stampin' Up! is donating $2 from the purchase price of each set toward Breast Cancer Research.  Way to go, SU!  I have far too many friends who have fought the battle against breast cancer and really appreciate the support for research into how to stop this disease.  Thankfully breast cancer can be beaten, especially with early detection...I have my annual mammogram scheduled for this month...don't forget yours!

In the meantime, here is a card I made at my "team meeting" with many of my local demonstrator friends.  We used the Hope and Strength stamp set with pinks and greys....such soft pretty colors, I love them! 

The base of the card was run through the Big Shot with the Perfect Polka Dots embossing folder...there is a "slick trick" of leaving the inside of an oval smooth and un=embossed to allow for easy stamping.  I will share a link on how to do that at the end of this post.  After running the top layer of Whisper White cardstock thru the Big Shot, I masked off an area (a piece of bond weight paper with an oval cut out to leave a space) and stamped the butterfly with Regal Rose ink. I cheated a little bit with my Basic Black marker...after inking up the butterfly in pink I used the black marker to go over the antennae so it would look more like a butterfly.

  Leaving the oval "mask" in place, I placed another mask cut in the shape of the butterfly over the pink butterfly then used Basic Grey ink to stamp for the sentiment stamp repeatedly to make a background. base panel.   That's pretty much all there is to it....I stamped the "H" for hope in pink and punched it out with a circle then layered it on a scalloped circle punched out of Basic Grey, of course had to use a bit of white gel pen to dot the scallops, how can I resist doing that?  Then attached some dimensionals to the back of the scallop and stuck them onto the white panel.  Sponged the edges with more Regal rose then layered it onto the 4.25x5.5" Basic Grey layer....that was it!

Ok, I promised to share a link showing how you can recreate the smooth oval shape with embossed area surrounding it so if you are interested in seeing a video tutorial, Dawn Griffith has a great one on her blog Click here to see how Dawn does it (http://www.dawn'sstampingstudio.com