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Tuesday, February 9, 2021

Clean & Simple with Black Cardstock

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No one loves a clean and simple card more than I do - it was such a relief when I finally realized that was my natural cardmaking style. It's not my style in my art journal, by any means, but it's where I'm most at home in cards. I love white space, but as I learned in an Edward Tufte class, there's no higher resolution than black and white on paper - no screen will ever give you that - and so I started adding black cardstock and coloring to my clean & simple cards and I loved them even more. They need each other to shine! So I have some clean and simple cards featuring black cardstock today with some adorable Concord & 9th stamps & dies. 

First up - possibly the greeting of the year - a layering, stippled YAY stamp! I decided to do it in turquoise and red because I wanted to see how it would look for 3D glasses. But then I couldn't find my 3D glasses to see what it looked like, so you will have to tell me! :) I combined it with the sentiment only set Kids are Grand and left the rest clean. I love that this set includes grandparent/child sentiments



Speaking of kids, there's also an adorable builder set that goes with Kids are Grand. I used the sentiment and the cute, layering sun die from Kids are grand and then built my own little girl - each top and bottom can be mixed and matched, and you can make boys or girls. I repeated the black matting layer to make it crisp. 



Probably my favorite thing is the new Painted Petals Turnabout Toolkit. I decided to do this in black & white too, just stamping all four rotations in white pigment ink. But my FAVORITE feature of this bundle is the little single die that cuts out ALL the sentiment strips at once! Oh my gosh! And I'm such a dingbat, when I first saw it I thought it was some kind of brick die, but all the sentiments are on a single stamp, and this die cuts them all at once with no border!! It also has a stitched circle die I used to cut the opening and two large word dies. This one is a toolkit so it comes with the jig, the adhesive eraser, temporary adhesive, stamps, dies and instructions.


Raise your hand if you want something to make quick & repeatable birthday cards for 2021? This simple, two die set is it - a huge greeting and a flurry of balloons, sized perfectly to take up the whole card front - these are freaking awesome to use with backgrounds from your UFO pile. If you want to see how I created the background I cut the sentiment and some of the balloons from, you can check out this video tutorial

The super cool thing about the balloon die is that some of the balloons are solid and some cut out for piecing like I've done - tons of combinations you could make for the balloons. I stuck with my black & white theme, piecing the black cardstock back in in come places, but you could combine patterned papers, watercolor washed paper, foil, glitter paper - all sorts of fun things. 



Here are all the supplies I used today. Come back for a carne guisada recipe!
Yay for Birthdays Bundle
[ C&9 ]
Petite Pals
[ C&9 ]
Kids are Grand
[ C&9 ]
Perfect Pairings Birthday Dies
[ C&9 ]
Painted Petals Turnabout Toolkit
[ C&9 ]
My Sweet Petunia
[ MSP ]
Pre-Cut & Scored Cardstock
[ CTC ]
Art Anthology BIG CRAFT MAT 24x36 311473
[ SSS ]
Rotatrim Professional Series Cutter -...
[ BLIC ]
Teflon Bone Folder - Ellen Hutson LLC
[ ELH | SSS ]
Crafter's Companion GEMINI...
[ SSS ]
Scor-Pal MINI SCOR-BUDDY Scoring...
[ SSS ]
Storage Envelopes, Medium 25pk,...
[ ELH ]
CheckOutStore Stamp & Die Clear...
[ CHC ]
Extra Large -50 pk, Avery Elle Stamp...
[ ELH ]
Mermaid tidy towel case and glue...
[ ETS ]
Lawn Fawn STAMP SHAMMY Cleaner LF1045
[ SSS | CST ]
Airtable: Organize your stamps & dies
[ ART ]



Whenever I modify a recipe, I keep the notes in Google Drive. This carne guisada recipe came to me from a friend, and that's what you'll see at the beginning. But as groceries got weird and hard to find early in the pandemic, I started subbing a few things and also shortcutting some things as I grew tireder of cooking haha. The one I made Sunday was the best so far, so read all the way through the notes of this recipe before starting, and enjoy!

Loveyameanitbye.


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3 comments:

  1. The alcohol drops on acrylic are beyond words!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Balloons❤️❤️❤️ I love them and your cards with them.

    ReplyDelete
  3. What wonderful cards! When I first glanced at the 1st card, I thought you made it with a stencil. I have several word stencils and I also make them with a Cricut and a piece of clear plastic (usually, the clear plastic that comes on the packaging of Cricut papers). So I'm planing on making some new stencils and use my markers to make the dots.

    I have plenty of alcohol ink sheets I've made playing around with the inks. I'm hoping to make the birthday card.

    Thank you for sparking some fresh ideas. I can't wait to start making cards.

    ReplyDelete

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