Experimenting with heat-gun and vellum.

You Make My Heart Flutter; Triple Layer Stamping on Vellum

I have continued playing with my new heat-gun and decided to try to make a triple layer stamping card with vellum, as I had success heat embossing on vellum the other day.

The birthday card from the other day made with heat embossing on vellum.

To make "You Make My Heart Flutter" I cut vellum to the size card I wanted to make, layered them with some temporary glue and started to stamp and heat emboss. I started with the sentiment in the center of the card before I decided where the butterflies should go. When I was done heat embossing I  cut matting to each of the vellum pieces and adhered them all together, before I attached it to the front of a card. I then die-cut a butterfly that has a shadow. The shadow was cut from red card stock, and the actual butterfly form vellum. I heat embossed silver on the tips of the wings of the shadow butterfly, before adhering the top and the bottom together. I finished the card off by decorating both the front of the card and the butterfly with some red pearls. 

What can I say? I love my new heat-gun!!

Reveal Wheel Cards

A while back I decided to teach myself how to make Reveal Wheel Cards. I had seen many really cute cards both on Pinterest and on Facebook, and one of the FB card making groups I follow has interactive cards as their January challenge. So instead of just making shaker cards, I decided to try something new. In order to do this I needed some new dies and I had an inkling that one of the online craft stores I use, s-craft.no would have them. Which they did! I ordered the "Lawn Fawn Reveal Wheel Custom Craft Dies", along with a bunch of "add-ons", and a few days later I received them in the mail.

www.lawnfawn.com

I started by going to youtube to see if I could find some how-to videos, which turned out to be too much of a success as there were way too many videos to choose from. I settled on a video by Jennifer McGuire, my go-to card making guru, and found a video in which she showed the process in an understandable and clear way. https://youtu.be/0N7XzA5uf3I

I didn't watch the whole video right away, but watched as I tried to follow along. I had cheated a bit and precut a few of the card bases and stamped them already, so when I saw how Jennifer stamped her card and then masked what she had stamped in order to create a background for her image, I got lost as I don't have masking paper. I realized much much later that I do indeed have some masking paper I could have used. Oh well, I can use that on a later card😌. 

So now I had stamped my images on the card fronts, and was faced with the problem of creating backgrounds on the cards. I decided to use some of my watercolor pencils to simply creating a blue sky and a green grass backdrop, not worrying too much that my paper would get warped. I created three really cute porcupine motif card bases.

Then I colored in my simple backgrounds, added water and warped the paper. I used "Perfect Colouring Paper" as I was going to color in my critters with Copic Markers and this is paper that is designed to withstand the alcohol markers without bleeding. This does, however, not mean that it doesn't buckle when you put water on it. Ultimately I don't think it will matter, as I can straighten them out by either weighing them down or even use an iron on them. 

After doing the backgrounds I colored them in.

I then started to assemble the cards. I had created the back for the cards by putting the wheel on with a small brad.

Using the tip of how you should not see any of the indented lines in your little reveal window and in the cut-out where the turning of the wheel happens, I was able to assemble the mechanism quite easily. It was when I went to stamp in my little reveal sentiments on the wheel I started having issues. Jennifer McGuire shared a tip she had learnt of marking the wheel at 12, 3, 6 and 9 o'clock, and then drawing in the shape of the window with pencil in the opening of the wheel, a tip I did not have too much success with, and I actually ended up ruining my first couple of wheels because I stamped in the wrong places. I went ahead and assembled the top part of my card to the backing anyway, and realized that the front REALLY needs to be flattened out before being adhered to the back part of the card. The result is that I have my little sentiments either too high up, too much to the left or too much to the right in the window. I will probably end up trying to force my card apart to try and salvage the front.

Anyway, I decided to put the porcupine cards to the side and start a completely new card using a different technique for the background. So I went ahead and used distress oxide inks and a stencil to daub in the sky and some ground. Then I just slayed out my stamps in the places that I wanted to have the image.

This was when I understood why Jennifer McGuire stamped and then masked her image BEFORE making the background. Although I wasn't faced with too much of a problem, as the solution of course was to die cut the motives and then adhering them to the background after I had colored them in. If I hadn't used a stamps I had coordinating dies to, I could have fussy-cut the motives out.

I was able to stamp the sentiments on in an acceptable way, and assembled the card to finish it. I added some purple Wink of Stella on the butterflies and some clear Wink of Stella on the deer.

After all that work and brain twisting, I was rather happy with how the card came out. Although I have to mention that I wasn't able to assemble the card totally without mishaps!! (I have realized that I am an expert at ruining my cards with tiny mishaps like stamping mistakes or fingerprints, or crooked assembly....if there is something that can go wrong with a card, you can be sure that it has happened to me!) This time I managed to be a bit impatient and put my thumb nail onto the arrow I had just printed to show which way to turn the wheel, and of course I managed to get an imprint of my nail on a white part of my card. I tried to erase it, but my erasers aren't ment for erasing ink, so I ended up removing it another way. 

This is the finished card:

cardsbyheidiangelika.com

A well deserved break....

I am in the midts of exams, and I haven't really had the time to make cards lately. Yesterday I had my first exam, and today I decided I would take a day off from studying even though my next and final exam is on Thursday. Therefore I wanted to reward myself by finishing up a card I started working on  before I started cramming for the exams.

I decided to try out a technique I have not tried before after I had seen one of my favorite youtube card maker, Natasha Foote, making a card using acetate as part of the card. Instead of creating an acetate window like she did, I decided to substitute part of my card with acetate. Therefore I decided how much of the card I wanted to be see through, before I measured and cut the front panel of a 6"x6" card. Then I cut a piece of acetate that was just a little bit bigger than the piece that I had cut out of the card front and used 1/4" double sided adhesive to glue it in place.

In order to be able to write inside the card without having the writing showing through the acetate, I glued another 6"x 6" card with the opening turning the wrong way, on the back of the first card. The result was a long card that could be folded into a 6"x 6" card.

I blended some Worn Lipstick, Seedless Preserves and Dusty Concord Distressed Oxide Inks and sprayed it with some Grape Fizz Perfect Pearl water mixture, heat set it before I cut out pieces about 1/8" smaller than the 2 card front panels. I adhered both with double sided adhesive. Then I cut two pieces of matching dark purple ribbon so that it was long enough to wrap all the way around, covering up the place where the acetate was attached on the back of the card front. The ribbon is also held in place with strips of 1/4" double sided adhesive.

The next thing I did was to mask off most of the inside of the card so that I could blend some Cracked Pistachio and Mustard Seed Distressed Oxide Ink on the part of the card that can be seen through the acetate. This was then spritzed with Perfect Gold Perfect Pearl mist to create the oxidized effect.

I chose the colors for this card based on the butterflies on the front. They are die cut from some scrap paper I had practiced my ink blending on a while back. At first I kept the shadow of the butterfly white, but then I decided that it would look better if I ink blended them to mach the inside stipe of the card.

 I die cut the word Dream three times and layered them with a piece from a scrap piece of the purple front panel on the top, and blended some more cracked pistachio and mustard seed distressed oxide for the shadow behind the word. I then traced around the sides of the word with a matching metallic purple marker. Unfortunately I was a little sloppy, had a little accident and got some stripes on the purple front of the word, and decided to color the whole word with the metallic marker.
Next I glued the butterflies and Dream on to the front of the card. I finished the card off with some light purple diamonds form Little Things from Lucy's Cards.

 This is what the card looks like when you open the front. I would have liked to have had a better way of attaching the ribbon around the acetate, but it will have to do this time.

The card measures 6" x 18" when it is opened up all the way.