I made this card for one of my closest friends who is celebrating her birthday today. Happy birthday, Kristen!! I’ve seen videos where Nichol Spohr makes shakers and uses the same panel as both the shaker border and the background, so I decided to give it a try with this one.
I started off by stamping some images from Altenew’s Peony Bouquet and Beautiful Day sets onto the smooth side of a precut piece of Distress watercolor paper. I used Simon Says Stamp’s Barely Beige ink, as I wanted to give no-line watercoloring a try. I also used some Daniel Smith watercolor dot samples. I’m not sure of the names – but I used four colors: red, yellow, green, and blue.
Now I realize the ink color is called Barely Beige, so I should have expected it to be very light in color…however, I was surprised at how faint it was. I couldn’t tell if my ink pad was on the dry side, or if it was supposed to be that light. As I applied the watercolor to the images, some of the lines slightly darkened in the same hue as the paint, but most of them almost disappeared. I realize that’s probably the intended goal when no-line watercoloring, but since this was my first time attempting it, I felt a little lost without the lines being visible. So I had to wing it and eventually made the watercoloring look a little looser when it came to the definition of the the petals. I really like how the images turned out, but will have to give no-line watercoloring another try soon.
Anyway, after the images were dry, I used some of the green watercolor and flicked some light paint splatter onto the panel. I did this with a couple different shades of green to give it some interest and match the variation of greens in the leaves. I tried my best to keep the splatters off of the flowers, but if any strays landed on them, I made sure to blot them up with the corner of a paper towel right away before they dried.
After the splatters were dry, I used the largest die from Avery Elle’s Scalloped Pierced Rectangles to cut out the frame. I kept the center piece to use as the background for the shaker, and stamped the sentiment from Concord & 9th’s Fill-In Phrases in Versafine Onyx Black ink. This is my favorite black ink for sentiments, whether they have bold, thick lines or are more delicate. I used my MISTI for this step, as it helped me repeat stamp to get the nice dark sentiment. Since the stamped and watercolored images were going to be behind the shaker bits, I decided to use some Moonshine confetti instead of colored sequins as I didn’t want the images to be completely obstructed. This confetti is slightly translucent and has a subtle shine that can appear gray, silver, or white, depending on how the light is hitting them.
I attached a piece of acetate to the back of the frame with 1/8″ scor-tape, then doubled up thin strips of double-sided foam tape to go around the opening of the frame. Before removing the backing, I went around the inside edges of the foam tape with my anti-static tool to remove any stickiness to prevent the confetti from just getting stuck to the sides.
I took a piece of Paper Source silver shimmer cardstock cut to 4.25″ x 11″ and scored it at the middle to create a top folding A2 sized card base. The background was attached with scor-tape, using the frame to help me center and line it up on the card base. The shimmer cardstock has a slick surface, and I wanted to be sure that the frame containing all the shaker bits was attached really well. So I used 1/8″ scor-tape around the background panel, to give the foam tape something strong and sticky to adhere to. I also used multi medium matte to randomly adhere five confetti pieces directly to the background, so that even if all the confetti fell to one area, there would always be some that stayed suspended in place.
After pouring a generous amount of confetti onto the middle of the background, I removed the backing from the foam strips and turned the frame over to carefully place it around the background panel. Everything was pressed down and secured well. The doubled up foam tape allowed for enough space for the confetti to move around freely when shaken.
Whenever I have a card base made from a slick material, like this shimmer cardstock, I like to adhere a piece of white paper on the inside for my writing surface. This also allows me to write my message on something BEFORE I adhere it to the inside of the card (eliminating the chance that I mess up the card after it’s all complete). I used the largest die from Avery Elle’s Finished Frames to cut a rectangle from some Neenah 70 lb text paper, and once my message was written, I attached it to the inside of the card with my Tombow dot roller. I used my custom stamp on the back of the card with some Midnight Blue Staz-On ink, and the card was finished!
