Coffee Mandala

It might not be very zen to create a mandala consisting entirely of caffeinated beverages, but when I saw all of the fun little icons in Everyday Explorers Co's Coffee Snob Stamp Set from The Ink Pad, my first thought was that they'd make a really cool mandala. I stand by that belief!

I confess that I "saved" this idea especially for the Coffee Loving Cardmakers' Fall/Winter Blog Hop, because the cards that link up to that are always AMAZING and I felt like I needed to bring my A-Game! That's "A" as in Amy Tsuruta, who never, ever, fails to inspire; and like me, rarely turns down a delicious caffeinated beverage!

This is one of those times when a MISTI turns a job that would be seriously daunting, into something perfectly simple. Because while I suppose I could have hand-stamped each icon four times, I doubt I could have lined them up as precisely as this. With the MISTI, though, I just used the grid to center my first element ("more coffee") on my 3.5" square of paper, stamped it, rotated the paper 90 degrees (WITHOUT moving the stamp!) and stamped again; repeating those steps until I had all four sides completed. Then I removed the "more coffee" stamp and placed the cafetiere, heart and star in a little cluster and repeated the stamping + rotation operation four more times. I made two separate mandala layers, cut out and matted both, then finished off with a single icon ("now I'm fully awake") which I fussycut neatly and added to the center.  

To make the mandala into a card, I matted with the cloud paper from Lawn Fawn's Into the Woods Remix paper pad and made a 5.5" square card from some Distress Woodgrain Cardstock.

Now that I've mastered this technique I want to get out ALL of my Everyday Explorers Co stamp sets and see what other fun mandala designs I can create! Happy Mandala Monday and Happy Coffee Lovers' Blog Hop! ♥