Beautiful image, beautiful paper--these two just had to meet! I colored Karen's delightful Love Window image with the Copic markers shown below, choosing my Copic marker colors from the Cosmo Cricket Early Bird paper mini deck. (You can click on any picture to enlarge it.)
I've made so many step-by-step coloring tutorials that I thought I'd carry this post a different direction--matting and aligning borders. I chose a small scalloped border die to cut the Early Bird papers. I always start with a longer piece than I plan to need so that I have plenty of room to trim my scallops evenly on each end.
Above, I have cut but not embossed the edge of the patterned paper.
Here I have also cut the mat layer, again, making it larger than necessary. I find that if I trim it to size too early, I almost always end up not perfect with either the top edge of my mat layer, or with the scallop on the bottom. If only the bottom edge has to be aligned correctly, and the other layers will be cut down to size, you have a much better chance of getting it exact.
Here I've trimmed only the top edge, leaving a 1/16" reveal. Next I will trim both ends, making sure that I end on the same part of the scallop on both ends with my cut. (In the case of this die, I can have a full scallop on both ends after it is cut.)
Here I am zig-zag stitching my matted border on after first tacking it in place with adhesive. I usually set the width of the zig-zag to overlap the 1/16" mat layer on both sides.
Finally, here is a detail of my Love Window card, with those little red-matted scallops tying in with the scale and color of the flowers. I hope that this is helpful to someone; thanks for visiting the CLASSroom today!
