Zodiac Birthday Card - Cancer Style

Friends. If you haven't been to Visible's blog yet, you are missing out. They just released an amazing array of new designs, and my heart is swooning at each of them! 

Among the newly released beauties is a whole set called "Written In the Stars" which has all of the signs of the zodiac and each of their attributes. 

I don't necessarily follow my stars or anything like that, but every once in awhile I have fun reading my horoscope. I'm a Cancer myself, and when I got my hands on the set, the attributes were pretty spot on "sensitive, caring, intuitive, sentimental, and emotional". 

Originally I thought about paper piecing my crab and pulled out a bunch of red patterned papers, but as I was pulling out my scraps, I came across this piece I'd made by sopping up the leftover inks on my craft mat after a project. (Waste not, want not.)

Since Cancer is a water element sign, the leftover paper totally spoke to me and I scrapped the scraps. 

Continuing with the water theme, I pulled out my Kuretake Gansai watercolors and added some various shades of red, with hints of blue.

I cut down the background, using mostly reds and orange hues. As I was chopping my paper to size, I spotted these old wax sealer things that I've never used and had a thought. I used my embossing tool to heat the wax, and pressed it into the background. 

I'm definitely going to use this technique again in the future because it resulted in "wet" spots, even though the wax is perfectly dry! 

I used some Weathered Wood Distress Ink and repeatedly stamped the Cancer phrase over and over again. 

Some additional stamping, fussy cutting, and blue fibers later and my card was complete! 

Head on over to the Visible Image shop to see all the new releases! Thanks for popping by!