Good morning all! Today I’m initiating a new series that I hope to do on the first Saturday of every month. I got the idea from Gretchen Barron. If you have a minute, you should google her site and check out how she steps up her cards! She’s very talented!
Anywho, back to the subject at hand … I made 3 cards, each one a little (or a lot!) different than the previous one. I used the Field Flowers stamp set for all of my cards.
The first card is a very basic, nearly CAS (clean and simple, which is usually only 1 layer) card.
I matted the vanilla card stock with my image on Concord Crush card stock (c/s) and attached it to my Wisteria Wonder base.
The sentiment from this set is stamped in the corner in Concord Crush Classic Ink. That’s it! Nothing to it!
My second card is a bit more involved: more layers, more punches, more popped up. Usually, that’s all one needs to do to take a card to the next level. Add another layer of card stock, pop up your image or parts of your image, with dimensionals.
If you look closely at this card, you can see that I layered the “stamens” of the flower. I also used my Color Spritzer tool and my Soft Suede marker to give the card a bit more depth.
The sentiment is another stamp from the Field Flowers set — after stamping it in Concord Crush on Very Vanilla c/s, I used my Large Oval Punch to punch it out. I used my Scalloped Oval punch and some Concord Crush c/s scraps to mat my sentiment.
Oh yes … don’t you love the butterfly? It’s from the Beautiful Wings embosslit, and I use this one a lot with my flower stamps! Love it!
Now, for my card with the ultimate “bam power”! (Remember the toothpaste commercial? He brushes his teeth and the result of the fresh mouth is the “BAM”?!! That’s this card!! LOL!!)
First, I stamped my Very Vanilla c/s with a retired French Script background stamp and Crumb Cake classic ink. I thought I had the current En Francais stamp, but alas ….
I didn’t want to make the background stand out, so I made sure that I pressed very lightly when stamping (*I usually lay my large background stamp down on the table, bring the ink to the stamp rather than the stamp to the ink, and then bring the c/s to the stamp, if that makes sense!) I then used the a la carte Elizabeth stamp with Soft Suede classic ink in my corners. Pretty, huh?!
I next stamped my image with more classic inks (this applies to all the cards): Always Artichoke for the flower stem, Concord Crush for the petals, Soft Suede for the stamens. Once again, I stamped, cut out, and popped up my stamens!
What about my c/s mat? Well, I embossed the Concord Crush c/s with the Lattice Embossing Folder and my Big Shot. Let’s see … what else? Oh yes, another c/s layer — I punched a strip of Wisteria Wonder c/s with the Scalloped Trim border punch that I layered just under the Very Vanilla c/s and my image.
After all that, the only thing left was to embellish the card further. I used my Big Shot and the Beautiful Wings Embosslit to punch/emboss a few more butterflies. The last thing I did was adhere a piece of Sticky Strip to the bottom of my page, cut a (longer) length of Crochet Trim, and haphazardly adhere it to the sticky strip. A quick bow, again with the crochet trim, accented with one of my Vintage Brads, was all that was left to add!
One last peek at the three cards together:
Thanks for joining me as I “stepped it up” today!
Jeannie
I enjoyed seeing how you stepped up this card. The third version is absolutely gorgeous!