Okay, I know I jumped ahead to winter for a minute but I'm back to the fall again. Our church is hosting a women's luncheon and the theme is "Give Thanks". I wanted to make a card for all the ladies in our Bible study so they could share thankfulness with someone in their lives.
I found this card by Snapdragon Snippets in the Silhouette Store it is called Fall Leaf 5x7 Rake Card and it is item number 66252. The design really caught my eye and I knew I had everything I needed to make it what I wanted it to be.
It is so fun to personalize a design with my Silhouette. Here is a picture of the finished product. Do take time to read on and find out what tips and tricks I used to make mass production a little less overwhelming.
First off let me tell you the card was designed as a 5x7 and I prefer a standard A2 or 5.5 x 4.25 card so I re-sized the layout. To do this I made a 5.5 x 4.25 rectangle on my Silhouette desktop and made the outline black so it would stand out from the rest of the cut lines. Then I placed it over the card cutout so I could get a visual on the size of the original in relation to the actual size I wanted. I then selected the entire original cut design and pulled it down in size until it was almost exactly the size I wanted. This re-sized all the pieces so they would fit an A2 card. I didn't cut the base card on the Silhouette as that is just a simple cut of a typical 8.5 x 11 card stock. All the other pieces I cut out on my Silhouette.
Now that I had all the pieces the size I wanted them to be it was time to start cutting. I don't know about you but sometimes this is the most tedious part. Because I was mass producing a lot of these I worked at filling the page with each color.
As you know I'm a Stampin' Up! demonstrator so I used the following colors to make my card. Some items are discontinued, sorry, but I can't afford to part with things I can use.
- Naturals White - the card base, the label front, the leaves (more about that later), the smaller layer foreground
- Garden Green - the rake tines
- Brown Sugar - the rake handle, the large layer background
- Early Espresso - the rake accents, the label background, the "ribbon" strip
Now about those leaves. I just couldn't bring myself to cut out numerous colors of card stock so I cut an entire page of leaves from the Natuals White. I left the entire sheet on the cutting mat and used sponge daubers and ink to color the leaves and the leaf accents.
This turned out to be a really neat idea. The sticky mat kept everything in place, I didn't get ink on the mat because I didn't pull the outer portion off until I was done coloring the leaves. Once they were colored I peeled off the unwanted portion.
Then I used the new Fine Tip Glue from Stampin' UP! to attach the smaller accents onto the leaves. For the leaves I used a lighter color for the leaf and a darker color for the small accent piece. The colors I used were: Calypso Coral, Pear Pizazz, and Crushed Curry for the lighter colors and Cajun Craze, Mossy Meadow and Hello Honey for the darker. Once they were all glued I just lifted them off the mat using my scraper tool.
Don't the piles of leaves look real? This turned out better than I had expected!
For the rake I didn't use the little green dots for accents, instead I used Gold Glitz Dazzling Details from Stampin' UP!.
I also didn't want to use the word "Fall" that came with the design. I needed the words "Give Thanks" to fit the theme so I used the stamp from For All Things and them used the Early Espresso marker to color just the words I wanted. I used the Stamp a ma Jig for placement. A trick I use is to put a line of removable adhesive on my work surface to stick the small label piece to and that holds it in place as I used the Stamp a ma Jig.
For finishing touches I made sure a couple of the leaves under the rake wove under and over the rake tines and I added some Candy Dots to the corners.
There you have it. I hope you enjoyed the post and the little tricks I shared.
Enjoy!
Kate