Today I am not entering any challenges but gave myself a sort of challenge instead.
I regularly do craft fairs and one of the areas I am always aware of is trying to cater for presents and cards for men. Usually I will end up with cards that are either brown and vintage or have gears and cogs on. So yesterday I set myself the task of creating a card that would be suitable for a man but was not in those styles!
I recently bought some 8" x 8" embossing folders from Crafters Companion that are textures, and my favourite of these is a leaf vein folder, so I decided to use this as a starting point for my card. I love flowers so thought about how I could change this and decided to focus on the leaf theme.
The start of the card was creating the background which I wanted to be quite an important feature.
I used a 'Falling Leaves' stamp set from Hobby Art, using the more solid shapes with Adirondack meadow and Versafine olive inks, stamping 3 times with each impression to get a variety of shades...
Once I was happy with this I used Peeled Paint and Mowed Grass distress inks to blend around the edges and part way into the middle of the piece of card. I then used Lindys stamp gang sprays (sea grass and rusty lantern) to add some extra colour. I wanted to use the embossing folder to add interest to the background but decided to use the deboss rather than the emboss side, putting versamark across the folder before running it with the card through my die cutting machine. Then it was covered with gold embossing powder and heated to highlight the veins...
As I really liked the background I did not want to add too much else to the card.
I chose 2 larger open leaves from the stamp set which I stamped in green then cut out. These were coloured in using distress ink and spectrum clear sparkle pen. I then over stamped them again in versamark and heat embossed them with gold, this had mixed results, some embossing better than others but I didn't mind the effect. Finally I wanted a larger sentiment for the card so chose Phil Martin's bracket birthday verses.
First I sprayed some white card with the same colours used for the background then stamped with black Versafine as I wanted the sentiment to be a focal point. This was then matted and layered using square dies with rounded corners.
The card was put together using glue gel so extra height could be added to the leaves and sentiment and the final card size was 8" x 8"...
A reasonably simple card, but hopefully one that would be suitable for either a man or a woman. I love the background created by the folder and will experiment with the emboss side as well soon.
Have a lovely weekend,
Jane x
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