Thank you: Inlaid letters

Sometimes you start a card knowing exactly what you’re going to create. Sometimes you start with a rough idea and it develops smoothly as you go along. And sometimes you get cards like this one.

I recently picked up the double-cut alphabet dies and thought I’d make a quick thank you card to test them out while saying thanks to Kathy Racoosin for running the Daily Marker 30 Day Coloring Challenge and to all the crafty Instagrammers for their likes and comments throughout the challenge.

And that was the extent of my planning: create a panel with inlaid die-cut “thank you”.

And so it began.

I had cut the whole alphabet out of a piece of watercolour paper to check the dies, so I decided to use those for the inlaid letter borders. I found a suitably pretty watercolour experiment piece to cut a panel out of, dropped the letter dies across it (making no attempt to line them up neatly) and cut them out. Handy tip: using Press ’n’ Seal to keep all the pieces together makes finding the bits you need to inlay later a lot easier.

To give me something to inlay onto, and to avoid fiddling around with liquid glue, I put a piece of card covered with Stick It behind the die-cut panel.

I coloured the letter borders with green Wink of Luna, darkened the letters with Distress ink  and inlaid all the pieces. And I was not happy with the effect.

I grabbed my pink Copic multiliner and drew some faux stitching around the letters. It helped, but not that much.

So I stamped the flowers in sepia archival ink and coloured them with Zig real brush markers. It was better, but I was still not happy.

I decided the letters didn’t stand out enough so I coloured them with the Zig real brush markers too. Still could be better aka “why stop now”.

I grabbed a coppery metallic Gelly Roll pen and drew centre lines on the letters. Could stop now but… oh, why not… I drew some copper dots across the background.

Finally happy — and recognising that anything more would be too much — I mounted the panel on a card base using fun foam.

Supplies:

• stamps:
  Altenew – striped florals
• dies:
  Concord & 9th – double-cut alphabet
  Create A Smile – double stitched rectangles
• colour:
  Wink of Luna – green
  Distress ink pad – tea dye
  Zig Clean Colour Real Brush markers
  Gelly Roll – metallic – copper
  Copic multiliner – pink
• paper and card
  watercolour paper
  Hunkydory Adorable Scorable – pearly shimmer
• miscellaneous:
  Stick It

This card was made on 3rd April 2017 as a thank you for The Daily Marker 30 Day Coloring Challenge.