Det blir alltid sol etter regn.

Det blir alltid sol etter regn.

Todays card is a card inspired by Natasha Foote and her tutorial on the Ripped Paper Tutorial:

It is a very easy way yo make a card that only requires some ripped paper, inks, some sort of blending instrument and a stamp or two. And of course and idea of what you want your card to look like😉!

My card started out with the green grassy ground and the hills in the background and then when I messed up a bit on the sky...I tried to put in some sunlight that didn't work out at all, and I ended up having to go fairly heavy handed with the blue on top to cover up my mistake. Then when I went looking for a stamp to put in the foreground, I realized that I didn't have any trees in my collection. So I kept searching for an other alternative, and found the umbrella holding woman. Seeing that my sky looked like there was a storm coming, I changed my original idea, stamped the woman out to the side, colored her with Copic Markers, before I went back in with some more blue and added rain-like stripes to my sky, and voila, I had a story😂! I knew what kind of text I wanted to have on the side, but also knew that I didn't have a stamp that said what I wanted, so I went with "There will always be sun after rain", thinking that it would fit as well.

To finish off the card I used the same blue ink (Distress Oxide - Faded Jeans) and created a narrow border on the edges of the card base, before gluing my topper panel onto it. I also added some Nuvo Crystal Drops in Midnight Blue around the stamped sentiment.

Love

Valentines Day is closing in, and I have been busy creating love themed cards lately. They are not made with your typical Valentines Day colors, pink and red, but I have chosen to use a different color palette.

The card I wanted to share today is a shaker card. I chose to use a background I created some months ago, when I made a distress oxide "watercolor" by stamping ink on my Tim Holtz Glass Media Mat (rangerink.com, bikuben.com), and spraying water on the ink stain. I then put my card stock face down into the watery ink until it was completely covered with the ink/water mix, and then I misted it with Perfect Pearl Mist (Perfect Pearls also by Ranger, mixed with water) to get a glittery look. I debated with myself which die I was going to use, but ended up with a really beautiful die that is used to cut out part of the  card front.

The die I used, is an unbranded die I have bought on wish.com.

I held the card front up against both black and blue, and decided to go with a black card. I also decided that the die I had used would look good as a shaker card. As always when I make cards I find myself having problems along the way, and this card was no exception. The problem arose when I was going to close the shaker card, as I had the shaker filler inside the front of the card, and couldn't use my regular method of centering the front to the actual card. I ended up winging it, and of course it got a little crooked. 

I die-cut the word love three times out of black cards stock, stacked, and glued them together for some dimension, put some glossy accents (rangerink.com) on the black and let it dry before adhering it onto my card. I finished the card off with some enamel dots from the KSCRAFT Store at AliExpress.com.

Since the card is black, I wanted to make it a little easier to write inside it, so I die-cut out an intricate frame without removing the middle part of it.

With an intricate and decorative white die-cut inside the card, it is a lot easier to write a message for someone.

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