Folded with Care

One of the best things in making cards is seeing ordinary paper become alive! Something that shouts beauty and shares love. In this lesson I reviewed many ideas to put some simple yet elegant cards together and to add some glitz or an extra touch to make a card stand out — like classy boutique stores on Michigan Avenue in Chicago or downtown New York’s Manhattan.

Since I love purple and it can be used for royalty this was just the right color for something special. The Altenew Craft-A-Flower is also a new special item. The latest is a TULIP. Tulips are such a welcome sight in the spring! They come in multiple petal formations and colors but always put a smile on our faces that nice days are coming with warmth and sunshine.

I love the Craft-A- Flower subscription at Altenew and even though I have several tulip stamps, these offer stunning beauty and dimension. So here I go to make my boutique card!

Sometimes we have to goof before things look right…and so it occurred here. I didn’t quite follow the instructions of die cutting the shapes of the flower with the right colors. I used light colors for the larger dies and got darker as the pieces became smaller. When the finished flowers were assembled…it just didn’t look right. So back to the drawing board –I realized the layering guide had the darkest colors on the bottom so I re-cut the pieces following the guide and found them so much easier to assemble. When done, there were my stunning tulips ready to be shown off on the Garden Trellis cover die. I chose some Reflections White Gold shimmer card stock for the trellis. It added a dimension of shimmer, still leaving the flowers to stand out on their own.

I stamped the sentiment from the Bergenia Builder stamp set on a vellum band with Altenew Crisp Ink Andromeda. Because the ink doesn’t absorb into the vellum like it does with card stock I used a Misti stamp positioner to stamp it multiple times, heat drying the ink between stamping by using my Darcie Heat Tool. Thus the image would be evenly stamped and darker, matching the darkest color of the purple in the flowers.