Hello again. I have a set of three cards to share with you today, including my first ever non-rectangular card. Summer is just starting to kick in here in Tokyo, and it’s feeling muggy already.

All three cards use the Ella’s Garden Leafy Circle die, and have used different techniques on each to create three different cards. All of the cards feature watercolour backgrounds. This first card has a background that I made by smooshing various blue and green inks onto my craft mat before repeatedly dipping the paper in, and drying each layer. I cut a white panel just slightly smaller than my card base, and cut the die from the top, placing the die so that the leaves hung down like a bower.

I die cut the ‘beautiful‘ sentiment from the same piece of watercolour paper. The words you are are from the Ella’s Garden Scribble Flowers stamp set, and I (look away now if you’re squeamish) cut the stamp so that I could use just the two words. There are many ways to partially stamp sentiments, but I’m not great at masking, and I’m really terrible at remembering to take the mask of the stamp, so that never ends well!

For this next cards, I combined the same die with the circle die from the Circle with Lines die. This gives a lovely border to the design. I rotated the cut piece within the circle to give more contrast between the teal and purple sections of the background.

This background is made with watercolour powders – a frankenmix of Ken Oliver, Brusho, and possibly others too. I love the vibrancy of these types of backgrounds.

Finally, my round card. This uses the same two dies for the top piece, and just the outer circle for the backing. I used my score board to score the back at 1/4 inch ( about 6mm, but my scoreboard is in inches) I then used the strongest tape I could find in my arsenal to glue the two pieces together. What I forgot to do before I took the photo is to shave a little bit off the bottom of the card, so it would stand up.

These cards were a lot of fun to make. I hope you are inspired to get crafty this week. 

Until next time,

Blessings,

Donna