Paper Seedlings: I SCREAM FOR ICE CREAM

My oldest daughter, Emily, had a big birthday this past weekend. I find Emily, a tremendously gifted illustrator/graphic designer, difficult to please with my cards. Although I'm sure she would beg to differ.

So, I set out to really WOW her for a change. Just how to do that? A challenge I felt I was up to.

Emily likes ice cream, so . . .

I started with MDS and the stamp brush set, Sweet Scoops. First step was to resize the cute cone to a large, workable size. I then piled on three scoops of the ice cream, topped by a shiny cherry.

The cherry didn't have any highlights and since I was going for realism (yeah, right!), I decided it needed highlights. There is probably an easier way to do this, but here is how I figured out to put two little highlights on the side of the cherry:

I added two of the circle punches, which, of course, were enormous, much too large for my little cherry. So I sized and resized, scrunched and moved, until I was happy with the look. I then filled in the little lopsided circle punches with Whisper White cardstock. This is so simple to do in MDS!

After printing out the ice cream cone on white cardstock four times, I proceeded to cut out all the separate pieces. I then lifted the various layers with Stampin' Dimensionals.

Well, my ice cream cone was complete, but now what do I do with it? I thought that, for the biggest impact, it should be placed against a white background. But, how boring that was.

So I got out four of my Stampin' Up! Embossing Folders, and embossed four pieces of Whisper White cardstock, rounded the corners, and added them to the plain white background.

I neglected to mention that the size of this card is 5 1/2" x 8 1/2". Yes, a single sheet of cardstock folded in half. Exactly twice the size of the cards I usually make. So each of the embossed sections was 2" x 5 1/4".

After I was finished attaching the cone to the embossed background, I stamped "enjoy" from an old Stampin' Up! set, adding a 1/2" yellow circle and a blue circle made from a regular paper punch to the center of the "o" to bring the ice cream colors into play once again.