Hello my crafty friends. I have a funny tale to tell you today about this card that I made in lockdown here in Sydney. We have three adults in one room for 14 days with a window (praise point!) that doesn’t open. I have just the little pack of supplies that I have brought for the next five months. It would fit into a large shoebox in total. When we emerge from here, I have a little shopping list – scissors, cutter, coloured paper etc that I plan to buy for my Australian crafting, but until then, I’m making do.

So, onto the card. I have had these lovely Paper Rose Tropical leaves dies in my possession for several months now, but haven’t had a chance to use them. I have brought a little cutting machine with me in my luggage. Mine is a Mini Maker, but I’ll link below to a few others as well since this one may be hard to get hold of, depending on where you live.

But before I got to the cutting, I wanted to make a watercolour background. I had brought about three sheets of watercolour paper with me to get me through quarantine. I used one of these, and some dye inks. The colours I used were Distress Inks in Squeezed Lemonade, Cracked Pistachio, Peacock Feathers as well as Altenew inks in Bamboo and Olive. Here’s where the substitutions began. I didn’t have a mat to smoosh the inks onto. No problem, I used the plastic packaging that the dies came in. I smooshed the little mini inks that I had brought in a random manner, and reached for my misting bottle. Uh oh! So, after some thought, I grabbed one of the paper cups that we’re given here, and a paintbrush and I flicked and flicked water all over that packaging until the ink had beaded up. I then laid the paper over and moved it around to get a nice multicolored piece of green paper.

I used the hotel hairdryer to dry the panel. Boy that sucker (blower, actually) has some power. It blew the paper right out of my hand twice before I successfully dried it. I then laid the die pieces on the panel, and cut some rough shapes using nail scissors. Yes, that’s right! Those handy little scissors that I threw in at the last minute turned out to be both serrated and curved! Still, they did the job, cutting the panel down to fit in the mini cutting machine.

I had a background panel in my stash I had embossed using the Hand Stitching 1 Embossing folder before I left Japan and I arranged my cut leaves onto this- some up, some down. I then set about making a grey strip with the sentiment heat embossed in white. After all, the hairdryer had done the trick earlier…Nope! it turns out that no matter how much you disassemble that baby, the powder doesn’t melt! Burned fingers, and the only place that melted was where I accidentally touched the dryer to the paper and smooshed the powder.

So, a white strip it was. (Cut, of course, with tiny cuts with the nail scissors!) I unwrapped the new Versafine Onyx black mini ink cube that I’d brought with me, and stamped with black on white paper. I don’t know what was wrong with this stamp pad – I’ve never had this problem with the others I’ve had over the years, but it had a very ‘hairy’ inkpad that left a bit of a furry image. Something else for the shopping list! The sentiment comes from the gorgeous Daisy Bouquet Stamp set. I compensated for the lack of grey paper by drawing a double black line across the strip. I really did want that strong horizontal line.

This sorry tale actually ends with a card that Inreally like, and it will certainly provide me with memories for years to come! I look forward to crafting on the ‘outside!’

Until next time, may you feel the breeze in your face and be able to smell the leaves.

Blessings,

Donna