I said yesterday that I’m rather fond of die cutting words; well here’s another example using the same one as yesterday with a totally different look.

The flower is from the You’ve Got This stamp set which was part of the Annual catalogue pre-order, so you’ve probably seen the image a lot – I used it myself earlier in the week. I stamped it in stazon black on watercolour paper – the stazon is necessary if you’re going to watercolor but it needs a different cleaner being an alcohol based ink. It’s not my favourite black. But currently winging its way across the country in my Holiday pre-order is a brand new archival basic black Stampin’ pad which I’m hoping I’ll like more.

I used my aquapainter and pumpkin pie ink for the centre of the flower and then rich razzleberry for the petals. The stem and leaves used old olive. I try to put on a pale amount of the colour and then build up –  I’m no expert but I like playing with the aquapainter – it’s an enormous amount of fun and of course as I practice, the better I’ll get. There’s a hint of the old olive around the flower – a tip I was recently given which helps the flower really pop.

The thanks was cut out of rich razzleberry using the Greetings Thinlits. These look very fiddly and a worry to remove from the die, but I’ve found that I don’t even need wax paper to help remove the word, it pops up perfectly easily using a paper piercing tool. That is not to say that there isn’t a new base precision plate, designed to give better performance with detailed dies in my current order!

I mounted the piece of water colour paper onto a base of rich razzleberry using fast fuse. I had a love-hate relationship with this adhesive; when it worked it was great but the tape kept sticking to the fast fuse container and not working. I’d have to take it apart and get it back in working order seemingly every time that I used it. Then I discovered that the issue was with the crafter. I saw a Stampin’ Up! video on how to use it and now I love it! The basic tips are:

Don’t press down too hard

Make sure that you do a sharp snap to the side to break the tape

and MOST importantly – alternate the side that you snap the tape to.

This last keeps the tape in the middle. Sadly I hadn’t consciously noticed that the tape ALWAYS stuck on the right hand side which coincidentally was the side I always snapped the tape to…

I finished the card off with a matching envelope liner in rich razzleberry in one of the retired background colours. I don’t have the brights collection of new backgrounds. Yet.

See you tomorrow,

Liz