Thinking of you: Girl on swing

I love challenges that push me to do something that I don’t normally do and the latest challenge from The East Wind has done just that. I’m sure I’ve thought about using paper piecing before, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never actually done it. The scariest part of this was printing the digi — I had visions of massive paper jams as the patterned paper either wrinkled up or came adrift from the carrier sheet in the printer — but I taped it down really well and it all printed with no problem.

How:

The first thing I did was to get all the printing out of the way: using the inkjet, I printed Aurora and the background digi on Neenah and then taped some green patterned paper to a sheet of regular paper and printed the background on it; I also printed Aurora on laser-compatible vellum.

I coloured the Neenah version of Aurora with Copics and fussy cut her out, using a craft knife to remove the enclosed areas between her and the ropes. I fussy cut the dress  and the long gloves from the vellum and fixed them in place over the Copic colouring with a little bit of vellum tape. I added a coat of Wink of Stella to the vellum to add a bit of shine.

More fussy cutting for the background: after colouring the ground cover and distant trees with Copics, I cut the foreground trees from the patterned paper and paper-pieced them in place.

I made a card base from pearlised card and adhered the background panel to it. Then heat embossed the sentiment on a piece of vellum, layered that over the background and popped Aurora up on some thin foam tape. The final touch was to add a few sequins, which provided a couple of places to hide some extra glue to stop the vellum dress flapping about.

Then I looked at it and decided that, although I liked the look of the vellum and needed it to set the sentiment off, I wasn’t happy with the way it hid the work I’d put in on the background. So I performed a bit of card surgery and, very carefully, trimmed the vellum away from the left-hand side of Aurora, exposing the background. And I am much happier with the finished result.

Challenges:

The East Wind – #61 Paper Piecing

Supplies:

• stamps:
  Justrite – extra grand sentiments
• digital stamps:
  The East Wind – aurora vine
  The East Wind – into the woods background
• inks:
  Versamark
• Copic markers:
  skin – E50, E00, E21, E11, BV00
  eyes – C8, BV02, BV13, BV17
  lips – E95
  hair – YR31, YR24, E23
  dress – BV01, BV02, BV13, BV17
  ribbons – BV01, BV13, BV17
  shoes – B01, B02, B04
  flowers (hair) – B01, B04, B06, G05
  flowers (dress) – B01, B02, B04
  swing – E53, E55, E57, E59
  ropes – E53, W1, W3, W5
  background trees – YG67
  background sky – B00
  background ground cover – YG45, YG17, G03
• embossing powder:
  Judikins – silver detail
• embellishments:
  Wink of Stella
  Pretty Pink Posh – 4mm sequins – sparkling clear
• paper and card:
  Neenah solar white 216gsm
  Papermill Direct – pearlised – ultra white
  Lili of the Valley – paper pad – bonnets & bowties
  Dovecraft – premium vellum