At last! I did a "clean and simple" card! And it was simple! And most of them were clean! (They are going, by and large, to 7-year-olds, so I am not too worried about the couple that got smudged.)
My daughter's birthday was last weekend, so I needed a batch of thank you cards (13!) for friends and family. I hemmed and hawed for a bit about what to do. I was tempted to try to use up stuff from my scraps stash, but that always takes a long time. Instead, I went to designer paper and coordinating cardstock and ink, for guaranteed wow and speed. I love how it all came together.
The "thank you" image is one I picked up at a beautiful stationery shop here in town (along with too much (????) Japanese paper). I told myself it would be handy to have a circular thank you stamp, and lo! I was correct. I love it when that happens. (I'm still waiting for the ideal moment to trot out my scrimshaw stamp, and appropriate occasions may be less frequent than birthdays and thank yous. Still, it was a gap in my stamp collection....)
This was a very punchy card, and very quick to come together. If you want to recreate it at home, and why wouldn't you, here are the dimensions: standard card base (I used a sturdy white cardstock, 5 1/2"x 8 1/2"), the patterned paper (Razzleberry Lemonade) is 4 1/4" x 2 1/2", the "thank you " is punched on 1 1/4" circle, and matted on a 1 3/8" circle (Rich Razzleberry). The scallop circle is a 2" scalloped circle, punched from coordinating patterned paper (also Razz Lemonade). The ribbon (crushed curry grosgrain) is about 4 3/4" long, trimmed with a notch to overhang the card (I love that!).
I also whipped up matching envelopes, feeling very pleased with myself. I have a nice funky flourish that I stamped with a very big and squelchy (juicy?) multicolour inkpad in the same bright yellows, pinks and oranges. I just love how those turned out. It's sometimes hard to get a nice matching envelope with a card that relies so heavily on patterned paper. I can't (a) bring myself to "waste" patterned paper like that lining an envelope and (b) be bothered to do it. In this case, the perfect stamp again presented itself as did the ink. There was a tricky moment when I wondered if I could find that ink pad since it's so big it doesn't fit any of the places I keep my normal inks. But I just said to myself, where is the first place you would have stowed it, and lo! there it was, cozily snuggled between my watercolour wonder crayons and my wood veneer. I must have filed it with the "W's" for "Wow-these colours match perfectly".
Well, thank you for stopping by and bearing with the horrors of my organizational skills and my overzealous use of interjections.
NSR: I went to see the Group of Seven Nutcracker with my SIL, niece and daughters on the weekend. It was fabulous! It was Ballet Jorgen, and their Canadian interpretation of the story was wonderful. The toys that came to life were woodland creatures and the dance of the loons was particularly magnificent. They are touring various places, so if they are coming to a stage near you, I would recommend them. I am no connoisseur of The Ballet, but they seemed quite good.
Bright and cheerful it is. It looks clean from here too. How come we don't get to see the envelope? I want to see it. I'm a bit envelope challenged. I've got the new MS scoring board which makes it dead easy to make envelopes from dp BUT its not easy for me to find dp that I like enough to use but not enough to cause trauma by using it. Can you tell us more about Japanese paper? I know origami paper and I've gone to online stores that sell Japanese paper but I've been overwhelmed by the nomenclature. Maybe you could do a video demo of it? Thanks for the post.
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