Wednesday, February 12, 2014

A Tutorial from our guest Linda

Hi all - I'm sharing a card with a new die cut I just bought: Lg Snowflake by Impression Obsession. It looked like an amazing die, then I opened the package and saw it was not a joined piece but 4 layered pieces. Had to play a lot with my Vagabond to get this thing to cut, especially in the center - did it with several shims and new cutting plates (my old ones were too warped). I didn't photo every step of my card construction but just took a few to show you how I worked.


First, here's a photo of the cut die alongside the metal die itself:
 
As you can see in the photo, it's a nice sturdy metal die - just needs a lot of pressure for the intricate bits. Next photo shows me separating the die into parts. I cut out 4 of them - white, light blue, kraft and glitterly aqua.

Next photo shows all the pieces laid out, just in the white - as you can see I tried to save a bunch of the little bits. You never know if they might come in handy...


I started playing around with a layout using a 6x6 piece of BoBunny Woodland Winter paper - love this collection! Because the snowflake is rather large, I decided to use a 6x6" square cardbase, so I cut down the blue piece to 5 & 9/16" square with a kraft mat of 5 3/4" square. See in this photo how I laid out the snowflake pieces and threw down a clear stamp to see if I liked it.
At this point, I hadn't added anything with the aqua glitter paper and you'll see how I changed up what parts I used from the snowflake! That's the creative process - I'm sure you all play around like this, moving things and trying others. In this next shot, you'll see I ended up embossing the JOY in white on a punched circle of pink patterned paper. I had totally forgotten that this month the DCD color is pink but I was playing around with this paper and thought it would look good with the blue! Anyway, you'll still see lots of bits and pieces of the snowflake, now in the multiple colors.
Then I started assembling my card - added the blue piece to the kraft mat, tied some string twine around it, added a felt Hero Arts snowflake, & pop dotted my sentiment. I added it all to my card base with foam tape. In this photo you'll see how I put a pearl where I wanted the center of my main snowflake since I had to take it off to add glue! I used glossy accents but had to work fast since it dries so quickly. Next time, I'd try a different glue.




Here's the final card:



And here's a companion card with more of the snowflake bits.  I had fun added some of the cutouts to the corners.  This is a wedding card for a winter wedding (neighbor girl just got married).  The sparkly aqua paper was used to cut out embellies for the guest tables so I had to use it in the card somewhere.

Thank you Linda for such a nice tutorial, the cards are gorgeous!
Linda mentioned to me that snow was very much on her mind when she was working on the tutorial due to still having snow on the ground and extremely low temperatures,  but I think it's perfect, it's still winter after all, and I'm also having much of that same kind of weather here in St Louis.
Also I wanted you to notice that little pink circle on her card, following along with our theme using pink.  If any of you are new to our challenges, no matter where or how you use a specific color as put up on the challenges it counts and can be entered.
Thank you all for stopping by Come back Friday for an extra special surprise post with our Guest Linda!
Hannah, the Die Cut Diva's, and Linda.

5 comments:

CinnamonSally said...

|Gorgeous cards Linda, that die is fabulous!!

Dawn T said...

Stunning card Linda and great tutorial

Arlene said...

Wow. The card with "JOY" feels like an elegant Russian artifact.

Beautiful snowflake. Just beautiful cards.

Cindy C. said...

Stunning results!!

stampingandstitching said...

Wow these are such fabulous cards, Linda! The die looks so intricate and fiddly to work with but the results are amazing! Thanks for all the photos which really show how it all works!