Monday, August 31, 2009

When you give of yourself

I was watching the Art and Soul episode on my website and Jeanette Lynton (the founder of Close to my Heart) called a card, "love in an envelope." Wow, isn't that a beautiful thought! I've had a lot of fun in the past few days making these cards from the Sweet Home paper and using the Wishes pattern book. Here's one using our brand new September stamp of the month. I can't believe it's truly almost September but I'm going with the flow.

Cut your paper like this:

12" by 6" card base - white works great but garnet would be cool too because it's going to show through
6" by 6" card front in Indian Corn Blue
6" by 3" garnet cardstock
5" by 1/2" blue patterned
3 1/2" by 2 1/2" blue polka dot
(2) 1 1/2" by 1" white cardstock
1 1/4" circle out of white cardstock
1 1/2" circle out of garnet cardstock

Distress everything with the Indian Corn Blue.

Take a dry embossing tool and turn your card front diagonally on your trimmer, press the tool down into the groove to make a line. Don't press too hard as you don't want to go through the paper. Continue making lines about a 1/2" apart then turn the paper the other way and do the same thing so that your paper will look like this. Sand the lines to make them show up.

Use a border punch to make a pretty border on your garnet paper. Dry emboss lines in your garnet strip about an inch apart and sand. Glue it down one inch from the left side. Now take a hole punch (size of your choice) and punch a hole in every diamond around the border as shown.

Glue the skinny blue pattern strip down a quarter inch from the left side of the garnet paper.

Attach the blue polka dot paper an eighth of an inch from the left of the blue patterned strip, 1 inch from the top of the card.

Using the big fluffy dandelion stamp from the September Treasures stamp, ink it up with Indian Corn Blue, then "stamp off" on a scrap piece of paper first, then stamp on your circle so it's a light application. Stamp the "when you give of yourself" stamp in the middle in garnet.

Glue the circle on the garnet circle then onto the card in the upper right corner of the blue polka dot paper. Stamp a small dandelion on each of the small white rectangles. Using your wiry sponge applicator, stamp the blue ink over and around the dandelions to subdue the white. Attach them under the circle, centered.

Put four brads down the left side of the garnet paper about once inch apart, and 1 1/2" from the bottom and the top of the card. Glue card front to card base, the dots will let the base color show through. Hope you'll give of yourself today and send out a beautiful card to someone you love.


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