Design Team: Denise O'Connor Week 3 Term 3

Denise O'Connor's Two for One Cards

We start the week with Denise's amazingly creative & practical way to create two beautiful cards in half the time! See how she was able to use one image for two different but amazing results!


I don’t know if all of you are like me, but sometimes I just don’t seem to have enough hours in the day to get everything done that I need to get done. Sometimes I really just need to make a card QUICK!!! Well today, I am going to show you how I was able to create 2 cards using only ONE eCraft cut in less than 15 minutes. That is right, this is so super easy and can seriously be done by anybody!

The first thing that you will need is a silhouette image. I have been really drawn to silhouettes lately and the Ella series on eCraftCentral.com are just perfect. They can fit into any kind of style, so if your style is vintage, shabby chic, whimsical, cutesy, clean and simple…it really doesn’t matter because you can do just about anything to these! For my project today, I decided to use the Simply Ella image.

The next thing that you will need is some watercolor paper (I used a brand called Arches that I bought a long time ago at Joann’s). We will also need some dye water-based re-inkers. In my cards today, I used Distress Ink re-inkers in Barn Door, Spiced Marmalade, Mustard Seed, Peeled Paint, Broken China, and Dusty Concord, but really any dye water-based re-inker will work. I also used the new Tim Holtz flat water brush. If you don’t have a water brush, you can use a paintbrush with some water.

I took my re-inkers and added a drop of each into a ink palette. I then dipped my water brush into the ink palette and swiped it across the watercolor paper. You could just add a drop onto a non-stick craft sheet and dip your wet paintbrush into it for the same effect. My way is just a little bit cleaner and it allows me to save the palette so I don’t waste the ink. I continued on with this until I finished my rainbow, cleaning off the water brush in between colors. Once I was done with that, I dried my watercolor paper with my heat tool. You could wait and let it dry naturally, but remember that I was in a rush! I could not wait, had to do it fast!

Once my paper was dry, it was time to cut! Since it had been a long time since I used this watercolor paper for cutting in the eCraft, I had to do a quick pressure test to find the right setting. I feed in the uncolored side of the paper and set my pressure at 1 with the blade cap on and selected the tree from the Fundamentals 1 SD card and hit cut. As I cut the tree, I moved the pressure dial up looking for the blue light. This paper is quite thick and I did not get the blue light, so that meant that I needed to do the same thing, but this time with the blade cap off. (Quick Tip: when you remove your blade cap, raise your console screen and put it in the well behind the screen so you don’t lose it. Don’t ask me how many times I have crawled around on my hands and knees looking for that cap on the floor LOL!) I got my blue light at a pressure of 3 1/2 with the blade cap off. Once I knew my pressure setting, I simply re-inserted the paper so that I would be cutting on the colored part of my watercolor paper and cut out Ella.

Now that I had Ella all cut out, I realized that none of the purple in the rainbow actually appeared on Ella. I can’t have a rainbow card without purple!!! So I grabbed a piece of crochet thread and spritzed it with some Crushed Grape Dylusions Spray Ink and dried it with my heat tool and tied that around Ella’s ponytail. If you are not a purple-lover like I am, you could totally skip this step! Since we did not add that much ink and water to the paper, I had a very distinctive white edge along the sides of the cut out. I decided to use the coordinating Distress Markers to ink the sides and then I just blended them in with my water brush. You could use any water based marker for this or just skip this step all together.

Next I fed Ella through my Xyron Sticker Maker (love how the adhesive goes right to the edge) and adhered her onto a black panel. I stamped my sentiment from Papertrey Ink’s Script Sentiments onto the black panel using Papertrey Ink Fresh Snow ink and then adhered the panel to a white card base. One card done, but now on to the second card.

Did you notice how pretty the negative part of my eCraft Ella cut is? What a shame it would be to waste that watercolored rainbow, so I simply cut down the negative image to fit on my card base. I stamped the same sentiment on using black Archival ink and attached that to a black card base with some foam adhesive and I am done!

The great thing about these cards (in addition to how quickly they came together) is that they will go in the mail quite nicely without extra postage since there are not a lot of layers and embellishments on them. But, you could also add more onto them if you want to.

As I made these cards too, I thought of several ways that I could do something similar. I could use my spray inks instead of re-inkers, or Distress Stains, or even just a pretty patterned paper. Ooohh…I could add a couple of spritzes with some Perfect Pearls Mists to get some shimmer. Really the sky is the limit! Please leave me a comment letting me know how you would do these cards? I can’t wait to hear some of your ideas!

Denise O'Connor

www.PurplePaperParadise.com

 

Are you loving Denise's use of inks?! We are! Thank you Denise for this wonderful project!