A perfect afternoon to blog

It's a quiet summer Saturday afternoon with a lovely warm breeze in the air and the the trees are swaying in the sun.  When the humidity is low, a summer day on Long Island can be quite pleasant.  I'm in my studio with the windows and skylight open, and the overhead fan spinning away. My hubby is having his Shabbat nap and I'm free to play all afternoon! YIPPEE! LOL
  I have something to post here today. I made my own background paper design.  I've read how the use of gesso on a stamp can make a really interesting affect on a design.  So I took some lavender color card stock and imprinted a leaf stamp all over the paper.  The I read about the affect of metallic acrylic paint over stamped objects.  So, I took a small sponge brush and randomly brushed gold metallic paint over the whole page. Well, here's a piece of that paper:

Oh, I'm disappointed in the results of the scan, but I also had to reduce the size of the jpg to make it fit here.  But, at least you can see what I've done.

Then, I made a card using this new patterned paper as the background of the front of the card:

As you can see, the colors used in the card, along with the two ribbons, the vintage picture and the three stones, seem to balance together. I outlined the picture with some peel off gold lines to make the picture pop out.  The actual card really looks better but I think that the affect I wanted to achieve worked! I hope you think so too.