Fathers Day Cards

Gee I had a ball making this card. It uses all my new rubber stamps - the owl (Inkadinkado), the harlequin and Eiffel Tower (Tim Holtz) and the funky man (unknown brand) with lots of TH inks on a manila folder card.

Fathers Day 2009

I bought a pack of 100 manila folders very cheaply - for the price of a single greeting card! - and distressed with my favourite Tim Holtz distress inks. It's a fairy with a wooden leg - one of Dad's favourite sayings when I was a child! I used some printed paper with fairies on it; the words are printed on the computer, stuck on leftover card and mounted on foam squares.

Marian and Keith's 50th Golden Wedding Anniversary

I used Kraft cardstock for the card and distressed it with my Tim Holtz distress inks. The middle is a circle of sheet music, the anniversary message is recycled from an old card, the bird is an Inkadinkado stamp and the 50 a Making Memories foam stamp. I used acrylic paint to paint 50 underneath as a shadow.

Layered ink technique on recycled card

My favourite thing is to use recycled cardboard for cards which I use from boxes and packaging around the house. The paper trimmer cuts a nice line and I do the rest with a craft knife. The kraft colour is great - it dominates everything I make at the moment.

I wanted to try out a new technique of layering colours using only inks. I stamped with my handwriting stamp first in a light colour, then used a stamped image of leaves (which I'd cut out of paper but had leftover from another project) so I used it as a mask to ink over with the red. I'll need to go easy next time - it's pretty heavy when you're using coloured card. Then I stamped with my angel image.

I had already stamped the flourish (Fancy Pants designs) on top of some acetate leftover from the last project so I cut it out and stuck it on top of the card using mounted foam squares (coloured in black with a pen). The fun of this is you can run the design off the page but I decided to be more conservative this time and keep it within the edges.

Tim Holtz distress inks

Tim Holtz demonstrates using the distress ink around the edges and note the way he sprays the ink with water for a watermarked effect. Haven't tried that yet.