Morning-Evening card

I made this for my other half at his request. Well, technically, he did only ask for a laminated card with “morning” on one side and “evening” on the other but I couldn’t bring myself to just do that. He has medication to take in the morning and evening and he is terrible at remembering whether he’s done it, so he wanted a card to remind him which is the next lot.

Knowing it would be exposed to the light all day, I decided to do it in lightfast watercolour rather than use my Copic markers, some colours of which can be very fugitive (which reminds me, I really should colour in a fresh hex chart).

And knowing that I would be laminating it, I chose a lightweight watercolour paper. Then I promptly forgot about my reason for choosing the thinner paper and created the morning/evening images on separate pieces of paper because otherwise the colour might show through (it didn’t).

I started by stamping the lettering with Versamark ink — the thing most likely to go wrong especially when you have to stamp it in two passes because you only have one of each capital letter. Next, I used archival ink to stamp the moon after masking the lettering. This was the trickiest part because it’s a layering stamp and it is remarkably difficult anyway to work out which way these line up, made trickier by having to work out how to place both them on the stamp positioner at the same time so I could double stamp them to ensure I got a decent impression on the watercolour paper. I got there in the end with a bit of fiddling. All the rest of the stamping was straightforward, as was the colouring.

Because I now had two pieces of paper to laminate together, it didn’t work very well and left a bit of an unsealed gap around the edge of the card. I was going to have to trim it anyway, but I didn’t want to leave that wide a plastic border. What to do?

The answer: get out a non-stick heat-resistant craft mat and my Cricut EasyPress Mini iron (which has never yet been used for its intended purpose of attaching iron-on vinyl) and iron the edges of the laminate. It worked. Not perfectly, but well enough for me to trim a sensibly sized border.

My other half is really happy with it. Now all he has to do is to get in the habit of remembering to turn the card round…

Supplies:

• stamps:
  Altenew – to the moon
  My Favorite Things – things with wings
  Lawn Fawn – Smitty’s ABCs
• colour:
  Daniel Smith watercolours
  QOR watercolours
• inks:
  Versafine – onyx black
  Ranger archival – shadow grey
  Ranger archival – watering can
• paper and card:
  Daler-Rowney watercolour paper 190gsm
• miscellaneous:
  laminator and laminating pouch