Folded with Care

Geometric shapes are more masculine than flowers for sure, when making a masculine or a gender neutral card. The Altenew Dot Art stamp set is terrific for creating lots of variety on a card. Recently I had gotten the Altenew Spheres and Spirals stamp and die bundle yet I hadn’t tried it yet. I wanted to see what it looked like so I did some experimenting. It turns out these two sets coordinate with each other very well.

I knew I wanted to do the card in an ivory or a kraft color base but wasn’t sure what would look best. I cut out two dies from the Spheres and Sprials set in ivory paper and then stamped them…the larger one with Altenew Shadow Creek ink and the smaller die with Mountain Pine ink. When cutting the large die, I also had the inside circle. This I stamped with Altenew Starlight ink. Ok, now to work on using and laying out a design.

I was inspired by the layout by Norine Borys on the Altenew page where she used the Dot Art on kraft paper. I liked the Dot Art designs and found that my Spheres and Spirals went well. I started to arrange them on ivory cardstock but there wasn’t as much contrast as I wanted so I switched to kraft. I have had success with white pigment ink on kraft paper before so I decided to use that for some of the Dot Art stamps. I arranged the dotted square near the bottom, the chevron lines next to it and thought the top left corner would look good with dots also. I took the rectangular stamp with dots for the corner — first end to end, then moving it toward to corner until the whole corner was dotted. Then I played with the other stamp shapes to finish designing the card. I stamped all the white pigment ink first. For the rest of the shapes I chose to use the Altenew Mountain Pine ink that matched one of the Spirals. I cut my spiral to fit in the corners of the card and popped them up with some foam tape.

For just a little bling I added a piece of gold and white washi tape across the corner under the dots. Then I knew that would lead to embossing a sentiment in gold.

I tried many stamps along the way to see where and what the sentiment should say. I ended up with “Birthday” from the Mega Greeting 2 set and “happy” from the Hello Winter set. The rest went quickly to finish off the embossing with the anti-static bag, Altenew embossing ink, Antique Gold powder and heat setting it with my Wagner heat tool.

Now I have still two pieces stamped and cut from Spheres and Spiral that I know will be called upon for future card. Always a plus to have some left overs.

I learned a lot with laying out the card design as I went along — trying various colors, shapes, etc. before committing to doing. With so many components here I wanted to be sure they meshed together to create a GREAT masculine card. YES, I like it! Hope you do too.