Have you ever seen a card design, on the web or Pinterest
and liked it so much you decided to CASE it?
But somehow somewhere between the picture and your execution of the
design something got lost in translation?
That totally describes my most recent card crafting
efforts. I saw this design last summer
from Stampin’ Dreams and
just now got around to crafting it. I
liked the colors, the birthday cake design and the background which is the
Stampin’ Up stamp set, Gorgeous Grunge which has become a current obsession of
my mine that I actually own. I did not
have the cake stamp set, Build a Birthday however, but I thought how hard could
that be to recreate with paper piecing?
I love paper piecing, as an engineer and a draftsman at heart, before
the age of CAD; I see it as the ultimate challenge.
I figured I would make the cake stand by edge punching the
fluted edges and hand sketching/cutting the base. As far as the cake layers go, they could be
simply created by strips of patterned paper.
With that design set in my mind I began looking for the right patterned
paper to fit my scheme. As I said before
I loved the color scheme Lori Mueller used and as it happened I do have both
the ‘So Saffron’ and ‘Lost Lagoon’ stamp pads BUT what I didn’t have was any
patterned paper that would work with those colors.
Weird, because while I don’t buy a lot of paper from
Stampin’ Up rather preferring to “impulse” buy it when I see it on sale. It has started to become a problem as I have
almost 2 feet high? of paper pads?!?! Yikes!! What I did find was a combination of muted
blue, lime green & gray. So using
the patterns from a DCWV Limoncello Stack and the stamp pads - Night of Navy
& Wild Wasabi, here is my first attempt at this card.
Not a very good one, I have to admit. The cake stand and cake are way too big, and
the paint splatter got away from me. The
card had way too much going on and not enough of a contrast between
anything. So I went back to the drawing
board, because I really like this card.
First stop was the Stampin’ Up catalog where I took a second look at the
Build a Birthday stamp set. This helped
me resize my cake stand and cake so they were more proportioned to my card
size. Then I took a second try at
creating the paint splatter and the “grunge”.
After inking the stamp I did the first stamp on scrap paper and then
stamped on the card face hoping to keep the splatter images more subdued. Also I sanded the cake stand to give it more
texture. Lastly I added hand cut candle
“flames” out of a yellow gold card stock to give the card some contrast. What do you think of it now???
