Papertrey Ink April 2017 Blog Hop

It's time for the monthly Papertrey Ink Blog Hop!  Nichole selected this as our inspiration for this month's hop. Now, I confess, I am not crazy about putting all these colors together but I think it works in this particular instance.  I am very much looking forward to seeing what other participants in the hop do. This reminds me of styles and colors we wore back in the 60's and it has two colors I almost never use - Yellow and Orange - and absolutely never wear. I always try to do each challenge in my own style while still following the color scheme or technique that attracted Nichole to the inspiration image to begin with. To that end I created a card using the colors in the image.  I even used Ranger Liquid Platinum Embossing Powder for the Sentiment Strip to stay with the grey tones. I used soft colors of cardstock in my card to try and mimic the look of the print.  In that, I think it is pretty successful.  I used Papertrey's Smokey Shadow, Sweet Blush, Stamper's Select White and Lemon Tart and SU's Crisp Cantaloupe cardstock. As far as actually liking the end product, eh, not so much.  So I was messing around with another option and ended up discovering a cool little trick to give you the look of die cut inlay with a lot less effort.

I started with a stitched rectangle panel of Sweet Blush Cardstock. I used the Simon Says Stamp Stitched Rectangles to die cut that panel. I die cut that with a Tim Holtz Mixed Media II Thinlit Die. Rather than using all of the positive pieces I wanted to add a color behind the cut outs. Just as in my previous post, I had Rose Gold, Smokey Shadow and Sweet Blush papers sitting on my desk from a scrapbook project I've been working on.  I put a panel of the Rose Gold behind the cut out and then gave the front panel a spritz of shimmer mist kind of as an after thought.  This resulted in a warped panel, so I did what I often do and ran it through my die cut machine with an embossing sandwich. Except, this time I had a different result!! Because I put my panel in the sandwich face up rather than face down, it pushed the Rose Gold Cardstock through the openings in my card stock, making it look like I had inlaid each of those pieces into the sweet blush cardstock.  It was late on Saturday night when I did this, but I was super excited to get back to my project on Sunday morning.   My sandwich order was A Plate, B Plate, Embossing Mat, card front panel face up, and a clean, unmarked B Plate on top.  If you use a marked up cutting pad, it will leave those marks in your cardstock so make sure you use a clean cutting plate. I have one I keep exclusively for this purpose and I leave it on a shelf away from the rest of the cutting plates so I don't pick it up by accident and cut into it.

Picking up where I left off the night before, I tried this with several different adhesives for the negative piece of the cardstock.  Originally, I used Multi Medium Matte to adhere the card stock to the Rose Gold Foiled Cardstock. When I returned the next morning I used Stick It Adhesive Sheets and Xyron to try this technique out.  They all worked fairly equally well but for me it seemed easiest with the Xryon 5 inch Sticker Maker. The trick for this is after you run the negative piece through the Xyron, run it through the embossing sandwich immediately and before you put the secondary paper on the back side.  This firmly put the adhesive on the negative piece without all the little extra bits having to be cleaned off afterwords.  I tried this a few times to do different things to see how it was easiest and this was it. I really love how this looks. When I first ran it through the embossing sandwich on Saturday night, I realized I had put it in wrong but when I saw the result, I had to go back and experiment so I could make sure I'd be able to duplicate this look in the future and so I'd be able to tell you all how I achieved it.


Here's another card done in Gold Foil Cardstock and Hawaiian Shores Cardstock.  I only ran this one through the embossing sandwich one time with my grey embossing mat. The Sweet Blush and Rose Gold card front was run through first with the grey embossing mat and a 2nd time with my Tan embossing mat.  The grey one is a bit thinner and doesn't push the paper through quite as far as the tan mat does so the WOW factor is more visible with the Tan Mat.  If you use plain cardstock rather than a foiled cardstock for the underneath layer, you can very lightly mist that panel on the back side with plain water which just helps the fibers to stretch a bit when you run it through with the embossing mat.

So there you have it - a happy accident that gives you the look of die cut inlay without all the tedious and time consuming effort.  While I enjoy the process of cardmaking, I don't want it to be difficult.  I want to use all the tools at my disposal to make my cards look the best they possibly can. It can look like I spent a lot of time when in reality I used a "trick" to accomplish that look!

Thank you so much for stopping by to see my cards for the blog hop.  Be sure to head over to Nichole's Blog to see all the projects for the blog hop!