Cards with Pizzaz

Hello there!  I’m popping in to share some very colorful cards that are quick and easy to make as well.

I stumbled upon the Elizabeth Craft Designs Moda Scrap Flower Lace 1 die on a recent visit to my favorite craft supply store. It was one of those moments when I was hit with a lightening bolt of crafty inspiration – or maybe it was glitter raining down from the heavens. I immediately had a flood of ideas.

The thing I love about this die is that although it is a very intricate die – it cuts like butter! Seriously! Paper came out of the die cut right away on the first pass. That’s a great quality for a pretty lacy floral die like this.

I knew this die would be great for all-purpose type cards. There are so many things you can do with this type of die so it makes a great addition to my crafting supplies. I actually ended up ordering the Moda Scrap Flower Lace 2 die from Elizabeth Craft designs because I hadn’t picked it up when I was at the craft store. Hind sight as they say.

I’d cut several of them out of dark cardstock (black and navy blue) and decided that they’d look gorgeous against a colorful background. While there are quite a few ways to achieve a bright colorful background on your cards, there aren’t many ways quite as fun as using Ken Oliver Color Burst Powders.

Love them, love them, love them!! If you’re at all intimidated by water-color or creating a background with a water-color look to it you’ve come to the right place.

Color Burst is a micro-fine pigment powder that reacts with water – plus it’s just fun to watch it in action with water.

When working with Color Burst, I always put a rag down on my craft mat to protect the surface and to make it easy to clean up.

I start with either a heavy weight cardstock (110 lb) or a piece of water-color paper. Depending on which you use – the water will react differently.

My cardstock is cut a bit larger than any die cuts that I was planning to use so that I have some wiggle room for the colorful background to take shape.  Personally, I don’t tape my project down as I like to be able to pick it up and move the water around on the paper but that’s entirely up to you.

For my first card, I picked out 3 colors of Color Burst powders in Purple, Teal and Lime Green.  I remove the cap from each bottle and point it towards the paper and squeeze it gently so that it lets out a small poof of powder. If you get too much you can move it around a bit with your finger.

Once I’m ready I grab my Distress Sprayer and spritz on a generous amount of water until the powder breaks down and the gorgeous mix of colors takes place. I generally get the bulk of the paper saturated. Any areas that the pigment powder didn’t break down as well, I just spritz on more water.

Since my paper is on top of my rag I can use the rag to dab at any excess water that’s rolling off the edges and corners or simply tip the paper up on one side to get the excess water off.

Once most of the excess water is off my background, I use my heat gun to dry it the rest of the way. You certainly can wait and let it air dry as well.

The beauty of the Color Burst Powders is that if your card panel didn’t turn out exactly as you’d hoped after it was dry, you can poof on some more color in areas or add different colors and then repeat the process. I was able to do that with my pink and orange panel. Originally I’d added some green to it, but decided that I didn’t like the way it sort of turned to mud. I dried the cardstock completely and then went back and added more of the Tangerine and Fuchsia colors until I liked the result. Obviously using water-color paper will hold up better to multiple applications.

For each of my cards, I repeated the same process. I did use water-color paper on the Orchid / Turquoise / Lime Green background as well as on the Turquoise / Ultramarine and then 110 lb cardstock was used on the Fuchsia / Tangerine background.

Once each of my panels was completely dried with my heat tool, I die cut them out using my rectangle scallop die from Die-namics Blueprint die set #24 and the Lawn Fawn zig-zag square stackables die set.

Next, I was ready to add my sentiments. The sentiments I used for the cards are from the Simon Says Stamp Thoughtful Messages stamp set. I’ve been in a sentiment collecting mode lately as I realized that I had all these awesome image stamps to color and play with, but I really had a very minimal collection of really good sentiment stamps. These Thoughtful Messages stamp set from Simon Says Stamp is really a great set. I love the pairing of the scripty word stamps with the regular typed font stamps. They look so cool together. They also work well with this type of lacy, floral looking card.

The sentiments I used for the three panels are the Love You Forever, Thanks for Everything and You are Amazing.  All great messages to send to friends and family. I stamped each sentiment using some Versamark and used Ranger Ultra Fine White embossing powder and some Recollections (Michael’s craft store brand) Sapphire embossing powder. Using my MISTI, I did pre-position my flowers on each panel as I was stamping the sentiments to make sure there would be room for the sentiment prior to stamping and heat embossing.

Next, I was ready to add my die cut Lacy Flowers. I added some Ranger Multi Medium Matte glue to the back of the flowers and carefully placed it onto my card panel.

The final step was to add various gems to my card front of each to give it a little extra pop.

When that was done, I was able to glue the panels to my white card bases. The two larger cards are A2 sized and the small square is 4 1/2 x 4 1/2.

I love that these were so easy to put together in an afternoon and it was fun to get inky creating my backgrounds. Now I have 3 beautiful cards to share.

I hope you’ll try out the Color Burst powders. There are lots more techniques to explore with these amazing powders and with colors this vibrant you can’t go wrong.

Thanks for stopping by today! Hope you enjoyed today’s post.

Hugs

Tonya