Folded with Care

The more I use stencils the more I like them. You can do soooo many things to your cards whether you watercolor, ink blend, add a texture paste — on a whole card, part of a card, diagonal, etc…The possibilities are endless.

I needed to choose — again I’m going for something I’ve had little experience with. I found a stencil in my stash, Altenew’s Flowing Drops. I wanted to use some paste or gel colored with ink for this project. Stencils work best when they do not gap on your paper no matter what the medium you use. To avoid these gaps, I sprayed the stencil with Pixie Spray (inside a box so it was contained rather than all over my studio) letting it dry for about a minute. This puts a fine low tact on the stencil that helps to hold it on the paper, keeping gel from getting underneath the stencil. Once the stencil was on top of the paper I then taped it and the paper to my Tim Holtz media mat.

I combined some Altenew Tide Blue ink and some Gina K iridescent glitter gel making this gorgeous color. Then I simply spread it on like butter over the stencil until all the spots were filled and it was smooth. The magical reveal was about to happen…I took off the stencil and had these awesome ‘flowing drops’ on my card.

Ok, gel can stick on your stencils really easily be be very hard to clean. So before I could admire it for too long I needed to get my tool and my stencil in warm water. I rinsed it well and took a paper towel to help get the gel off the stencil. I went back to the media mat and cleaned it up also setting aside the newly stenciled cardstock. The gel needed to dry for up to an hour so I just left it overnight to be sure it was completely dry.

In the morning I started planning the rest of the card. I tried different paper backgrounds and sentiment word dies to see what would fit best. I wanted as much as the colored stenciling to show as possible so I played with the size of the card and the cardbase ending up with a 4 7/8″ x 5 3/8″ stenciled piece on a 4.75″ x 5″5″ purple background. No, this isn’t a normal size card but it will fit in a square envelope just fine and in order to show off the beauty of the stenciling I needed an off size.

I chose the Altenew Mid Century Frame die, cut in vellum to go behind the happy birthday. I wanted the whole die to be used, including the inner circle that is normally cut out. Here I just positioned it as if it hadn’t actually been cut. The vellum helps to make the words stand out but also doesn’t totally cover up the stenciling. I cut the Happy Birthday die out three times in purple paper and glued them on top of each other for more dimension. To keep from seeing the glue through the vellum I turned the happy birthday upside down putting liquid glue on only the middle letters, attached the circle, then added glue to outside letters and put the outside ring of the Mid Century die on the letters. Then it was just a matter of again adding glue under the letters to hold it on the card front. I put an acrylic block on top for a bit until the glue was completely dry.

The finishing touches were some Ranger Glossy Accents added to the purple letters making them shine also. Shine, color, dimension of multiple sorts put together to make a magnificent birthday card. When’s your birthday? Would you like me to send this to you?