Stampin' Royalty Challenge #3

Another Wednesday and you know what that means????? Another Challenge over at Stampin' Royalty. Well I had a tough time with this one. I wanted it to be fabulous, and having seen what the other Goddess' had come up with, I felt completely intimidated by the talent on our design team. So I tried a new technique in order to spice things up.
I decided to try the dry embossing technique that has a smooth space in the middle. You get this look from using an embossing folder of course, but then you replace one of the clear cutting pads with a photo matte from the dollar store. This one was for an oval photo. Please check out this tutorial on Patty Bennett's Blog here. I traced the mat and made a mask which I used to create the outside of the oval. I traced it onto post it notes to get the perfect oval shape - The inside oval was made with the wide oval punch and a few post it notes as well. Next I used more post it notes to cover parts of the remaining donut shape and then I used a sponge to fill in the areas. This technique is called retifit. I also used the smaller stamps from the new set Totally Tess. Each section has a different stamp featured. Once I was done, I pulled all the post it notes off and stamped the sentiment in the middle.
Below you will find my first attempt at this card. I stamped it all and then embossed it for texture, but I felt that the texture wasn't featured as well on this example, so I made the one above. Plus I'm not terribly thrilled about my watercolouring on ol' Tess there, so I took her out of the card above.