sponged_star_mask_birthdayI recently purchased the Hearts & Stars Decorative Masks and I've been itching to give them a try. The card to the left is what I came up with for my first attempt. I used a really old color challenge from my favorite site for the color scheme on this card. I thought that they would be perfect colors for a birthday card. I used sponge daubers to apply the ink inside the stars on the mask. The trick with this approach is to be careful with the various colors. The stars at the bottom of the mask are quite close together so it is easy to mix your colors within the stars. Also, you'll want to make sure that you haven't mixed colors on your dauber before you collect more ink from your ink pad. I have a couple of faint Bermuda Bay streaks on my Daffodil Delight pad because I wasn't careful.

I also experimented with a couple of other techniques for using these masks. The first is using a spritzer with alcohol and a few drops of Tempting Turquoise ink refill. This is a super quickspritzed_star_mask way to use the mask and you get some nice soft edges on the stars. You can add more drops of ink refill to get a stronger color in the spritzer.

traced_star_maskMy other attempt was tracing the outlines of the stars in the mask using Stampin' Markers. This was the try that took me the longest, but it is super easy to incorporate lots of different colors without having the ink mix together in the little stars. My husband suggested that you could move the mask and trace a larger star around a smaller one. I didn't do it here, but you could definitely do that with this mask.

I think that these masks can be a lot of fun, and they provide a different option for creating a background for a project you're working on. You can be selective and only use stars to create a spray look, or you can use the whole mask to get an all-over look of the images. These masks are nice and big (8" x 8"), so you could also use them on a scrapbook page if you want. They are pretty inexpensive, so I encourage you to try them out.

I used the following materials to make the card: