One of the things I love about creating is that you can find inspiration anywhere! It is absolutely everywhere! I love to find inspiration in fabric as fabric is a huge part of our lives. We wear it, sit on it and use it for a myriad of things. One of my very first crafting loves was sewing and I love being able to mix fabric and paper crafting and combine them into fun and unique ideas.
Today's card design is inspired by some fabrics that I love. I love bold colors and floral prints with a sweet retro feel to them. These beautiful fabrics from Heather Bailey inspire me with their color palette and large blossoms.
Image from Heather Bailey's Flickr Stream
One of the latest stamp sets I've purchased had the most beautiful big flowers and reminded me of this type of fabric. I decided to pair this set, Lovely Garden from Stampendous with some eye popping bright and fun Gelatos color and see what happened.
Gelatos are a gel medium that goes on a bit like lipstick and pastel mixed together. They are waterbased and can be thinned with water, blended, mixed into a paint or even a mist. There are so many different ways to use them!
To start out my project I stamped the large beautiful blossoms from the Lovely Garden stamp set onto a Sticky Back Canvas piece with Ranger Jet Black Archival Ink. This is my go-to ink that I use all the time. It stamps so well on everything, especially fabric and other hard to stamp surfaces.
Once the background was stamped, I then scribbled on some color in all the different areas of the design.Start out with a small about of color, blend and layer it. Then add more layers and blend them in until you reach the look you want.
The canvas does take quite a bit of pigment to cover so keep blending and building it up.
After peeling off the sticky-back canvas backing, I adhered it to a card front and then stitched the edges. The stitching step is not necessary but I love the look of stitching paired up with the texture of the canvas fabric layer.
I wanted to add a sentiment but not cover up my beautiful background as that would defeat the purpose of creating it. Some Crystal Clear Plastic proved to be the solution and the sentiment was them stamped on that.
You may notice in the above photo that the stamped sentiment looks great but is a little hard to read. It's not quite ideal.
My solution was to scribble some of the lighter colors of Gelatos onto the plastic on the reverse side of the stamped sentiment. This worked great as I already had them on my desk and it tends to blend in well with the background as they are already used there.
To attach my plastic layer, I used a Tim Holtz Tiny Attacher to staple it on. A few sequin stickers add some pretty gold bling to the design and make a very pretty and simple accent.
Thanks so much for joining me today in the CLASSroom! Look around your world and see what inspiration you can come up with!
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