A Rare & Extraordinary Friendship Card with Shilo Miles

We are rolling out the Crafty Crew red carpet today for Shilo Miles and this dreamy underwater friendship card! Shilo featured our Rare & Extraordinary 4x6 Stamp Set and Bubble 6x6 Stencil, and she even used the May 2026 Crafty Stamp Co. Sketch Challenge as her layout inspiration. From the layered ocean background and bubbly stencil details to those sweet narwhals and pops of pink hearts, this project is full of texture, movement, and happy crafty magic.

Here’s what Shilo had to say about her project:

To start my card, I stamped out these happy little narwhals and some of their accessories. Then I colored them with my Copics. Once I had all these cuties colored and fussy cut I knew I wanted to create a water background. Which also means – TIME TO PLAY!

I’ll break my process down for you -

 Making a textured water background:
-        Cut a plain white cardstock to fit an A2 card-base leaving a ¼” border – 4 X 5.25”
-        Using a stencil and texture paste, put a thin layer of paste over the majority of white cardstock…it’s ok if it doesn’t go all the way to edge. Remove stencil and allow to dry.
-        Once the texture paste is dry, use distress inks and ink blenders in a variety of blues and purple over the entire white cardstock piece. Use a lighter and darker pressure to get a variant of shades. The ink will enhance the texture of the paste as well.
-        Then splatter the paper with a couple shades of blue. Let dry.
-        The final step is to generously splatter with white. I use a watered down acrylic paint but whatever you normally use is fine. Let this dry and DONE!
 

Because I used the sketch, my card came together quickly after playing with my water background. I used three vellum circles to mimic the sketch but I also used some of the coral and seaweed to count as the “circles” from the sketch. I do this often with sketches…a circle doesn’t have to be a circle…a star doesn’t have to be a star…etc. You are not required to take the sketch “literally” – they are there to get that creativity flowing!

Thanks so much for stopping by today. I really hope you pull out some of those fantastic Crafty Stamp Co stencils and get messy and PLAY!
And don’t forget to join in on the May Sketch challenge! 

Be sure to check back here to catch all the amazing projects being shown by our team.

I hope you have a lovely day!

~Shilo XO