Mosaic Card

I recently got some Kuretake Gansai Tambi Japanese watercolour paints and wanted to give them a go with these lovely Clearly Besotted flower stamps.

First, I masked off the edges of my Ranger watercolour card and I stamped the flower images using Versamark onyx black ink (in retrospect I should probably have used a dye ink since this did bleed in some places). I then used a normal black ballpoint pen to add longer stems and an extra leaf to the flowers, as otherwise it would’ve looked like they were floating in mid-air.

I did some very basic watercolouring as I’m only a beginner – as you can see, I’ve tried to do some shading, but I think I need more practice! Then I did a grey-black background and peeled off the masking tape.

Next, to create the mosaic effect, I used my paper trimer to cut the final image into 6 pieces that I then arranged on the page until I was happy with the layout. I used double-sided tape to stick them all down on my blank card.

The ‘fabulous friend’ sentiment is from a Clearly Besotted stamp set but I can’t find it on their site so it might be discontinued. I stamped this on white card and then coloured in some Anita’s vellum paper with a purple Copic marker and mounted the sentiment on top. Then I cut around the edge with some craft scissors to get the wavy edge.

Finally, I covered all of the flower petals in clear Wink of Stella and then went over this with some Glossy Accents and left that to dry.

My 2015 Christmas Card

Hi, all! I may have disappeared off of the face of the internet for the past few months but rest assured I’ve still been creating. This past November, I’ve been doing #nanowrimo (Google it if you don’t know – maybe you’ll want to join in next year!) and have been really wanting to make cards but didn’t want to sacrifice my 1667 words a day to do so.

With Christmas coming up, this was obviously a problem! So I  designed one particular card and put a different spin on each one I made to try to get them all done quickly (I had about 30 people to make for).

My plan for these cards was this fab rhyme I came up with:

“Emboss some vellum

Mount on glitter

Add a critter!”

It’s not Shakespeare, I realise. But I like it.

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To make things easier, I did each stage of the cards together. I cut a load of white cardstock down to around 14.5cm x 10cm (a little bit smaller than my blank cards) and set those aside. Then I embossed these Mama Elephant sentiments on strips of vellum, some in gold, some in silver.

Some of these pieces of vellum I mounted directly on to glitter, like you see with the cow-in-the-Santa-hat card. Mostly, though, I attached the vellum to my white cards and then mounted that on glitter paper for a nice border.

With others, instead of mounting on glitter, I created my own, slightly more rustic, borders. As you can see with the hedgehog and the horse cards, I smeared the edges of my white cardstock in clear Versamark ink and then heat-embossed this with my gold embossing powder. I just love the horse in the hat! The non-traditional Christmas images are my favourites.

I did make a few more Christmas cards outside of this simple design, which I’ll document for you. Until then, Merry Christmas!