Folded with Care

In this Level 2 class of the AECP instructor Therese Calvird talks about the color wheel and how to find colors that will coordinate, compliment, and contrast to give your work a pleasing look.  This turned out to be a quick, fun card to make as I actually used papers that I had created months before.  So, I will start by telling you how these were made and then tell you about the card itself. 

The background is made with Distress Re-inker bottles using colors of mowed lawn, blueprint sketch, and salty ocean.  Jennifer McGuire has a video on how to make your own stamp pads by using multiple baby wipes folded together, use the re-inkers to add drops of ink, then stamp with whatever stamp you want.  It’s really easy and can give some unique ink colors.  When you are done stamping, rather than throw out your baby wipes with all that ink on them, pick them up and rub them on cardstock.  When I first heard of this technique, I didn’t think I’d like it but I had soooo much fun with it I made like 25 backgrounds by swirling it, dabbing it, striping it on new cardstock.  Now I did get pretty inky – my hands were blue for a couple of days – but it was so much fun.

The paper for the sentiment die was made probably a year ago, with Tim Holtz alcohol ink on Ranger Silver Sparkle cardstock.  This cardstock is special for alcohol inks and the silver provides a very shiny metallic look to the finished product.  Although I didn’t write down, at the time, the colors I used, I believe they were Sunset Orange and Dandelion.

Now onto the card…

One of the lessons in this series talks about using a cover die as the main background and then simply adding some colorful sentiment dies and or flowers to make the colors pop.  I used the new Altenew Cutout Tangled Loops cover die but kept all the pieces of it and glued it all down as my background. (It probably would have been easier if I had embossed the image into my paper rather than actually cut it…but oh well, next time.)  Since the paper had a mix of yellow green, blue and part blue-violet, I thought the yellow-orange would be great for the Altenew happy birthday die.  On the color wheel Red-orange, Yellow-green, and Blue-violet make a triad of a harmonious color scheme.   I am a sucker for sparkly things so besides the sparkly sentiment, I added some random gems I had and a couple of Honeybee small gems to match.  I did cut my sentiment out in orange craft foam as well as the paper so that it would have a stacked, 3D look.  It’s fun to use colored foam behind die cuts as it can add another dimension or enhance the color already there.

As cardmakers and scrappers we always seem to have papers, scraps, strips left over from projects.  I think I have about 10 drawers of scraps of paper or die cuts that were cut but not used.  That’s one of the fun things of making cards when you can open that drawer and just pull from already made pieces.  Such a treasure trove we hold.

This was a great class and I know I will be using my color wheel a lot.  Hope you like my card with colors I don’t know if I would have picked otherwise.

Happy Birthday!