Nicole's birthday was back in mid April so that just goes to show you how far behind I still am on getting these cards posted but stick with me and I promise to get them all up soon! This technique for making a card is nothing new altho you may not have seen it before. I want you to know that I didn't think it up or come up with the idea myself. I saw it done somewhere and thought it would make a great card and so here we are. The great thing about making this card is you really need few supplies to get it done and make it look great. I find these dinner size napkins at dollar stores everywhere. I found this particular one at my local Tuesday Morning store. I cut the blue mat to size, The card is 5.5 x 5.5 so I believe I cut the mat at 5.25 x 5.25". The next thing you need is white card stock if you want the color of the napkin to remain true. You peel away the layers of the napkin and only use the printed top layer so when you apply it to your card stock whatever color you are using will show through. The napkin becomes kinda translucent. I used gel medium to glue my napkin down but you could use mod podge or pretty much any of your favorite wet glue I suppose but I really only recommend these two. You have to have edge to edge coverage and you need a glue that will stay wet long enough for you to get the napkin into place. I will tell you that I made a boo boo when I was gluing down my napkin and instead of throwing it out and starting over I just decided to fix it and I will tell you what I did so that you can learn from my mistake. Like I said, I was using gel medium and I don't have alot of experience using the stuff so I don't know if all of them are created equal. lol. I happened to be using some that was pretty thick and I don't know if that's just a characteristic of the medium or if you can get it in different thicknesses. So I took my white card and I use a bigger size than what I need for the card base so that once the medium is dry I can use my trimmer and cut it down to the size needed. So I was applying my medium and I got my napkin laid down and then the next step is to apply more gel medium over the top to seal it. Just like you would mod podge anything. So when I was going over the top of the napkin with my medium I got a little heavy handed in the area right where the bird is. I tore a great big gaping hole in my napkin I thought I had ruined it. but I stuck it down the best I could and let it dry. While that was drying I took another napkin and removed the layers and then started fussy cutting out the bird. Not so easy to do on something as thin as tissue paper. lol. But not to fear, I got it done. Once the gel medium on the napkin was dry I CAREFULLY added another layer of medium only to the area where the bird would be going and lay my bird right into place taking care to line up all the edges of the print so it looked seamless. Then I added my top layer of gel medium over the top of the bird only. Now, here's were my bad memory comes into play, I can't remember if I added the glitter to the gel medium or if I waited for that to dry and then added glue back to the bird area and then added glitter. I think I used the glue but I'm sure you could do it either way but I'm thinking I used the glue because I had gotten the gel medium off the edges of the bird and I only wanted the glitter to stick to the bird. So I added the glitter and let that dry and then used my enamel accents in black to dot in the eye and let that dry. Once it was all done and had dried over night I used my t square to square up the image and used the paper trimmer to cut the napkin covered card stock down to the proper size to fit the front of my card. It's really a simple process if you don't have set backs like did and like I said, I could have just as easily tossed it and started over. Napkins are cheap and that's part of the beauty of this technique. Ok, I'm going to hurry this blog post along and show you the inside of the card because you can obviously see how I just stamped a sentiment and punched it out and then added it with a silk flower I had in my stash. I did remove the plastic center of the flower and I added my own brad to the center. I also had some berry looking bits from a spray and I tucked them in under and around the flower. That finished off the front. and the sentiment is made by Unity stamp co.
For the inside of the card I cut another piece of that same blue card stock and layered it inside then I cut down a piece of white to fit inside the blue and I then took my Martha Stewart boarder punch to punch out the bottom edge. The sentiment was stamped on a separate piece of white card and I used Hero Arts ink but am unsure of the color and the stamp set is by Dylusions By Ranger inc. and the name of set is "say what you mean". I then cut out each line of the stamped sentiment and it comes with the boarder around the words so all I needed to do was cut it apart. The Happy Birthday was a sentiment from Hot off the Press and I'm unsure of the stamp set name but you can still find it in their current catalogs. I used some Powder Puff chalk ink in yellow to stamp that image. Here's a crafty tip for those of you who are just learning about stamping. All clear stamps are not created equal. You have just plain acrylic stamps and they are made by companies like Hot off the Press and Inkadinkado and tend to have a cheaper price point. Then you have Photopolimer stamps and they are the cream that rises to the top of the stamping world. lol. I find them made by companies like Close to my Heart and Hero Arts and Paper Trey Ink and even Simon Says Stamp. Either of these kind of stamps will stick to an acrylic block and sometimes they are hard to tell apart but as you buy more stamps from different companies you will know to look for what they are made of and you will know by the pricing of each stamp set. I have even learned how to tell them apart by the "feel" of the stamp. I really can't describe that to you but the main thing is the Photo stamps feel stickier. I know that sounds crazy but you will learn how to tell them apart. Now I took the time to tell you all that to tell you this. Not all inks will stick to and stamp well with your common acrylic stamps but I have found one kind of ink that does tend to stamp pretty well with all kinds of stamps and that is in particular Colorbox Fluid Chalk Inks. I've found most other chalk inks pretty much will do a good job too with acrylic stamps but I really like either the colorbox or the powder puff. I know you can get reinkers for the colorbox and it comes in many many different colors, I am not sure if you can however, get reinkers for the powder puff inks. But, Hey, don't just take my word for it. go out and buy from lots of companies and find out what you like best and what works the best for you before you begin stocking up on their products. And don't ever, ever buy crafty supplies just because they are cheap. If they are cheap and you know that they work great Perfect. I would say go for it..
I also wanted to show you the envelope I stamped for this card because it's kraft card and I wanted to show you how well the chalk inks stamped on it. So here's a picture of that now:
I used acrylic stamps for all these images and they come from lots of different companies. I used chalk ink for all the images and then I used my copic markers to color in the flowers and used my souffle pens to do the yellow centers.
That's all I have for today and I'm sorry that the post was SO long but if you hung in to the end you are a true champion and my crafty hat goes off to you my friend. Thank you all for stopping by and checking out my blog today and I hope you have a wonderful day today. I hope you learned something new today as well and if you liked (Or not) what you saw here leave me a comment. I love to hear your feed back. Lots of hugs, amyk
