Three more days until Valentine’s Day. This makes me sad. I’ve been on a roll making cards lately and I think it’s the theme—Valentines. I’m more likely motivated to make Valentine-themed cards than Christmas cards. I never get tired of designing them or putting them together. Also, I never get bored of looking at them when I’m finished making them. Galleries, blogs, and Pinterest are filled with them right now, so inspiration is easy to find.
The above cute, little funky girl is a Unity Stamp called Frazzled. I’ve stamped her quite a bit when messing around and getting inky-fied and have used her on a card (visit my scrapbook.com gallery—button on the right). The stamp is approximately 1.5" X 3.75" but I wanted her bigger to fully fit on an almost standard-sized card. Remember this post? So that’s what I did. I scanned her into my computer and made her a cut file for Silhouette and then I was able to fill her with digital papers from Nancie Rowe Janitz’s Journal Your Art Out 5 kit. Also, I was further capable of cutting her silhouette (with my Silhouette-ha!) from chipboard and mounting her to the chipboard for dimension and weight. When I was finished assembling the card, I mounted her to the card with dimensional adhesive and applied glossy accents to her button eyes and heart. I LOVE her! Look at her socks—Adorable!
For the inside of the card, I used a sentiment from Vintage Sentiments 2 kit by Nancie Rowe Janitz. I adore these!
I’m more than pleased by the results of this card—inside and out!
Onto my next card share . . .
Again, I used the Vintage Sentiments 2 kit by Nancie but placed the sentiment on the outside. I wanted the sentiment to be the focus of the card. That’s when Spellbinders Resplendent Rectangles come into play. They’re a perfect set for focusing on what’s in the middle. It looks like I’ve spent a decade making the layers of this card but it was really pretty simple—I only used two dies! The Spellbinders system also plays well with digital elements because you can see through the window of the die, so placement is a dream come true (ADD embossing to that dream!). When I get a new set of Spellbinder dies, I trace the window of each die on a piece of paper, scan it into my computer, and use the scans as templates to place my digital elements. Then I’m able to print them exactly the size I want onto cardstock and then use the dies to cut/emboss. It’s frustration-free and you get beautiful results time after time again. I’m hoping in the future that Spellbinders will release a digital version of their dies that will coordinate with their system (one less step don’t you think?).
Once this card was assembled, I applied glossy accents to the heart for a little pop.
Nancie’s Journal Your Art Out 3 kit was used for the frames. I LOVE how using Nancie’s kits make me look like I got all inky-fied and messy with paint, but really, all I ever do is apply some distress inks here and there and around the edges to my liking. You’ll find printing her papers out in real life and applying distress inks is very satisfying as they coordinate well together. Also, they look awesome when you dry emboss/wet emboss designs on them. It looks like you’ve spent quite a while putting the background together. They are fantastic!
Below are the digital products used in the above cards. Click on the collection image to be taken directly to the product pages at jessicasprague.com.
