Lisa's Card

This striking card uses decorated chipboard shapes and BasicGrey papers to great effect.

Materials and Tools

• Square white card blank
• Papers from the BasicGrey Urban Couture collection
• Maya Road Chipboard shapes
• Gold brads
• Gold pen

Instructions

1. We will make several bold embellishments for this card to complement the striking Urban Couture papers that will give the finished card it's distinctive look. To start, we'll cover the card with the papers to form the main background. We have used 2 different designs from the collection and hidden the join by adding a strip of a third design over the top. Simply glue the papers to the front of the card and trim to size.

Once the background is done, we'll start work on the large flower embellishment. Take one of the chipboard flowers and apply a thin layer of glue to the front surface of it. Place your sheet of paper upside-down on a table and stick the shape onto the back of the paper. Once the glue has dried you can roughly cut out the shape from the sheet of paper. Using a craft knife and cutting mat, carefully trim around the edge of the shape. The easiest way to do this is to leave the shape upside-down on the cutting mat and cut away the excess paper using the shape as a guide. You can improve the finish by using a nail file to rub the printed paper down at the edges, which gives you a smoother edge.

In the example above, we have further decorated the shapes by rubbing the edges with a light coloured chalk ink pad and added gold lines with a pen.

When you are ready, glue to the shapes together and glue them onto the card. You can complete the effect by using a gold brad though the middle.



3. The other detailed part of this card is the name plate. The flowers behind the name plate are made in the same way as step 2. There are several ways of creating the lettering for your card though. We have die cut the letters using a Quickutz alphabet. You could use any alphabet dies to get the style of text you want. Another option is to use one of our alphabet rubber stamps, but you could also simply print out the name onto a sheet of white card on your PC and inkjet printer.
Arrange the letters on the rectangle of card and mount this on another sheet of card that is slightly bigger, to create a frame. We have used an offcut from the paper used to cover the flower shapes earlier, so it matches really well.
Glue all these pieces together, with the larger frame at the back, followed by the 2 flower shapes and finally the nameplate at the front. Push some brads though each corner and glue the entire thing in place on the card.



4. To add a little extra details, we have die cut out some vintage corner shapes from another off-cut of the red paper and attached these to the top left and bottom right corners of the card.



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