Tile Works Welcome

Friday's QKR Stampede Challenge was Shaped Cards or Anything Goes. I don't usually make shaped cards, but as it happened I attended the Stamp & Scrap expo Friday and picked up the Tile Works Spellbinders Nestabilities that were perfect for this challenge so I decided to play. I used the 2nd largest size die to make a card that would work well as a welcome to the neighborhood gift tag.

I had some pieces of plain office manila file folders left over from another project, so I used one to for the card. Before I removed the cut tag, I used the die as a stencil to sponge gumball green ink over the embossed portions around the card edges.

Originally I was going to make this a typical multi-layered card, but once I took it out of the die I realized that the combination of die cutting, stenciling and embossing was pretty interesting and the card didn't need layers. I stamped the main image from the Up In The Air set in Memento Tuxedo Black ink in the center. I colored the leaves and flowers using an aquapainter and gumball green and purely pomegranate inks (in retrospect, the aquapaintr might have added too much water and a blender pen may have been a better tool for this.) I didn't like the way the branch just floated in the center of the card, so I extended it to the edge using my basic black marker and then stamped  and colored the image again on another piece of the same manila folder scrap. I fussy cut two bunches of flowers from the scrap piece and attached them to the card with dimensionals. I used the larger bunch to cover most of the branch extension, so that it wouldn't be so obvious that it was hand drawn, and added the smaller bunch over the large bunch on the original image for balance.

The tag was fine, but I thought it still needed something. I remembered that Jeanne's Friday's Free For All challenge on SCS was to "put a bow on it" and that seemed like the perfect embellishment, so I grabbed a fork and made a small bow using a piece of long retired narrow green Stampin' Up! grosgrain ribbon. I attached the bow with a mini glue dot at the bottom of the bird house to finish off the card. I liked that he raised elements formed a triangle that drew the eye to the birdhouse and sentiment in the center of the card. It's a simple card, but it's still cute and would go very well with a gift to welcome a new neighbor.

Recipe:

Paper: manila file folder
Ink: Memento Tuxedo Black, Gumball Green, Purely Pomegranate, Basic Black marker
Stamps: Up In The Air
Accessories: Aquapainter, Green Narrow Grosgrain Ribbon, Spellbinders Nestabilities Tile Works Assortment