Beth's Paper Cuts: Bokeh

Hello stamping friends. I have seen a lot of cards using this fun technique and so I decided to give it a try. It is very simple to get this fun Bokeh effect with sponges. In photography, bokeh is the aesthetic quality of the blur produced in the out-of-focus parts of an image produced by a lens. Bokeh has been defined as "the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light". Don't ask me how to pronounce it, I have heard it many different ways.

I started with a Pool Party base and a Perfect Plumb mat layer. On my Whisper White main panel, I sponged on layers of pool party, perfect plumb and elegant eggplant ink.

I made a mask by cutting circles out of acetate. Then I sponged White Craft ink in the circles. I moved the mask around making sure to sometimes overlap the circles.

I used another piece of acetate to stamp my greeting. You can stamp directly onto the main panel but I found that it was hard to get a clean image on top of the craft ink, so I use Stazon on the acetate strip so that not too much of the background was hidden behind more cardstock. I attached the acetate behind the flower so that the adhesive would not show through. The flower is stamped in versamark on Perfect Plumb cardstock and embossed with black embossing powder. And, joy of joys there is a paper punch that matches the flower, so it was simple to punch out and adhere to the base with a couple dimensionals. I also added a bit of basic black ribbon.
Hope you give this a try!