Colour Block Backgrounds

Happy Spring Morning.

Today the sun has decided to make a rare appearance, giving me hope that the spring rainy season will come to a close in the near future. This is the perfect time to be doing a post showing some bright beautiful fun cards.

My phone has been suggesting more and more YouTube videos to me lately and admittedly I have watched a few. The Jennifer McGuire series have popped up a lot and I have been enjoying those immensely. So today I will be showing off what I made after watching her Color Blocking Techniques video (I'll put the link at the end of this post). I had a ton of fun and made some wonderful cards.

The supplies I picked to try out this technique, I had either not used in a long time or had never used before. I pulled out the 6 Vivid stamp pads that I have had since the beginning of my card making, back about 22 years ago. The tree stamp I have had for about 15 years and the cute girls under the umbrella and on the bike I bought a few years ago second hand and have never used. This was a great opportunity to bring them out and play.

This technique was fun and playful and the cards turned out nice and bright. I will try it again using some of the deeper colours in my collection to compare the finished results. The white embossing stands out beautifully against the vivid colours and it will be interesting to see how it looks on other colours.

Here's the link   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPRqVbCZ6OY&list=LLrPw3KR7TMCTKUPVvRy-_3g&index=7&t=0s

Hope you are having a lovely spring!

RedBear

SpellBinders Curved Border Dies

Hello again. I am waiting for my banana bread to finish baking and since I am stuck on this level of the house and am definitely not in the mood to vacuum, I thought I would do up another post. I recently stole (borrowed) Zoo's two sets of border die's from SpellBinders (Curved Borders One and Two - each with 6 dies) and fell in love with them. Oodles of fun playing with these dies and I can see making waaaaay too many cards with them.

I have done two sets of cards so far. Each time I sat down to play with them I chose a couple of colours of 8 1/2"x11"paper, cut them half then started cutting different borders from each end of the paper. In this way I ended up with an abundant amount of die cut pieces to mount on to a card. I mounted all the pieces onto the card bases and then decorated them at this point. Probably a backward way of doing things but that was how my brain was working at the time.

When it was time to decorate them I found it hard to cover them up, so only used bows (made with the aid of this awesome video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gw6vUApUCrk&list=LLrPw3KR7TMCTKUPVvRy-_3g&index=70&t=969s), Dollarama bling, small die cut shapes and a couple of butterflies from a page Zoo gave me that she coloured and didn't know what to do with (She colours beautiful things and then they sit in her craft room where no one can see them. Such a crime. Thanks, Zoo, for letting me show these off !). Upon previewing the post I discovered that the two cards I made with the butterflies are not in the picture file. I gave them away before I took pictures. Typical me. I know Zoo has one so she may add a picture when she gets a chance.

Anyway... enough of me babbling. Here are the cards I have made so far.

The possibilities with these die sets are endless. I look forward to playing with them again in the future. I know Zoo will want them back when she sees the pretty cards but they have such a long distance to travel back out west that they may have to rest up at my house for a few more weeks : )

Using strips of scrap paper

Hello, yet again. I am never on the computer to work and then three blog posts in two days. Zoo will fall off her chair! It is a very grey weekend here and my life is in a weird holding pattern and for some reason doing these posts is a nice break, so here goes another one.

Zoo sent me a link to use up some paper scraps, knowing that I don’t throw anything away and was running out of room in my scrap paper box.

The link was      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv2EL8jZhZ8    and showed how to glue/tape thin scraps of paper onto printer paper and then die cutting out an image or saying to make cards. My scrap paper box was full, so I gave it a try.

I first used up just a few pieces of paper out of my pink scrap box and here is the result. I didn’t measure the width of the strips I cut, but just winged it with my cutter. I liked the slight variances in the widths of the strips. I don’t have a huge selection of dies that cut out sayings and shapes that are not for tags, so I chose my Fredward Bear Die Cut  - by Memory Box Inc.

 It was a little blah with just the bear cut out, so dug out my punch-anywhere flower punch by EK Success Brands and punched out the background. I saved the little flowers, etc., that came from the punch in case I wanted to use them. Much better!!

The two finished cards turned out so cute that I spent an hour or two cutting strips out of more scrap paper and making more blanks to use. Believe me though… a little paper goes a long way! 

 I had an idea to use different edging patterns to cut out waves, etc., from the striped paper. It produced a neat effect without too much difficulty. By tracing the pattern onto the back of the striped paper, it was just a matter of cutting along the lines and placing them in order to be glued onto a plain coloured background paper. I chose black card stock as my background to show off the stripes. I then used my Big Shot to cut out shapes. Like usual, the negative part cut out can be used on the inside of the card or for another card.

 

I also free-handed a dinosaur to cut out.

This was a fun use of scrap paper. I have started saving thin strips of scrap paper in an envelope to make it easier next time.

Take care! Red Bear : )

Metal Tape Practice

Hello again. Long time no see! Life… you know : )

Zoo found something on line about making boxes, frames and tags with metal tape. Ironically, this was at the same time that my husband and I were doing renovations and were using this product. Needless to say, I was intrigued to find a use for the tape that didn’t involve long days of ripping a building apart and months of rebuilding it.

The links she originally sent were as follows:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4NI_8DdCJM&list=PLVqfrnNFxTJRqepNH0IgKvndDhPsLnBed&index=6 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmCdZ1QfYVY&list=PLVqfrnNFxTJRqepNH0IgKvndDhPsLnBed&index=1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGc7Nd_xCY8

We decided to experiment during one of our Skype craft sessions and began by rummaging through our supplies to see what variety of things we could try under the tape.  I found: metal and paper die cuts; sequence shapes; punches; chip board buttons; a button; a pink felt heart; bead string; raised red stars; and a wooden oval with the letter T cut out of it. I tried different numbers of layers to see how the tape would cover each thickness (I wrote the number of layers beside the objects glued to the page).

 I then covered the entire page with metal tape. Not knowing what I was doing, I put the tape on in nice even rows so only the objects show through.  This looked very blah when finished, so I added more layers and shapes of tape on top to give it some character. Finding things to push the tape into and around the objects was a challenge. I ended up using the lid to a gel pen and my fingers for the most part. Using my double ended embossing tool, I added details like a spider web, grass, etc.

When it came time to paint over the tape I used Crafters Acrylic paints purchased at Dollarama. I tried three colours per page and discovered that I prefer just plain boring black. The other colours I found just looked odd. 

Lessons I learned in this experiment were that: different size and shape pieces of tape gives the paint more places to sit to show off the object; tears in the tape going over the beads and wood objects can be hidden when painted; even one layer of paper shows up through the tape, so it is not always necessary to layer objects to be seen; and adding details with pens or other tools is fun and adds personal touches.

Have fun! Red Bear : )