Creative Blessings: Happy St. Patrick's Day! (CQC #128)

3.17.2012

Happy St. Patrick's Day! (CQC #128)

Making this card definitely got my fingers inky. I've been planning this card for some time. Here's what I wanted to accomplish with this year's St. Paddy's Day card.

1) Make green sparkly paper
2) See if I could make a shamrock using a heart punch
3) Use several colors of green to make a card

Yahoo! I accomplished all of those things. In the process I learned a lot of "what NOT to do" through trial and ERROR. I'll be sharing some of that with you in today's post. If you are interested read it all. If not, scroll down and look at the pictures. :)

Originally I was going to use the old olive color on my card because I have Old Olive ribbon. Instead, I took my cue from this weeks Colour Q challenge, so I had to improvise to make the ribbon.

Aren't these colors great? Here's what I did to make these colors work with Stampin' UP (only) products. SU doesn't sell green glitter paper, so I took the Silver Shimmer Paper and an old Garden Green Marker and colored the paper. (P.S. I don't recommend this. The ink didn't really dry and the marker nib is all chewed up. Instead, use a re-inker in the color you want and use an Aqua Painter to paint it on. Then heat set it with your heat tool. Live and learn. :)

I let the ink dry overnight... actually it was a couple of days, and then punched out my hearts with a small heart punch. The ink still wasn't completely dry after several days and I got my fingers all inky trying to add adhesive to the back. First I tried glue dots. FAIL. Next I used Tombow multi-purpose glue... MUCH BETTER. The glue gave me a little wiggle room when placing the shamrock hearts and had good adhesion to both papers.

To make the stem for my shamrock, I used the Bird Punch on that same colored glimmer paper and then used my paper snips to cut off the leaves.

The ribbon was my next tricky part. As I mentioned above the only green ribbon I have is Old Olive. I do have some Lucky Limeade Bakers twine, but it wasn't working... a) it wasn't a color in the challenge and b) it was White! The white just didn't look right with so much Very Vanilla (Ivory?) Again, my marker came to the rescue. I used that same Garden Green Marker and colored the White Bakers Twine. It made another mess of my fingers, but hey, it's St Patrick's Day, so it's okay to be a little green. I think if I had to do it all over again I would buy a green re-inker and use that to color my twine.

So that is my success along with a few failures. Whomever I give this card to won't notice anything other than a special card made just for them. :) Isn't paper crafting fun? Even when things don't work out the way you plan they can still be super special.