Poinsettia cards

I used a pearlised off white card for the base and third layers. The second layer was a pale green swiss dot on the left and a plain burgundy on the right. I used spellbinder borders to cut the scalloped borders and nested classic ovals to cut the frames. Two spellbinders fleur de lys corners were added to the frames and they were layered onto the sentiments which I printed on my bubble jet printer and cut out afterwards. I finished them with a touch of bling.

The floral pieces were cut from a piece of paper that was shaded at the edges. The bottom set of petals were cut from the darker part of the paper, the second from a medium shade and the third from the lightest shade. Once layered I added a diamonte centre.  It was a bit of fiddling around to cut from the patches I wanted so I’ve made a set of papers that can be printed out and put them in my shop. The branches behind were cut with a Sullivan’s punch which I bought from Lincraft. the ribbons were done floral artestry style, by looping the ribbon around fingers and wrapping some florist wire around the middle of the loops. Bend the loops up and wrap the wire around the bottom. Cut off the wire about a cm from the ribbon and glue it under the flowers.

Talking about glue, I saw some embellishments being made on YouTube with a hot glue gun with a precision nozzle and I just had to have one. I’m notoriously messy with glue, and one with a thick tip is a bad option in my hands! The precision guns are not easy to find but I did manage to get a Rapid Point gun in Eckersleys for around $23, which  is a rechargeable cordless model. Lincraft now has them for around $20. However, I am sad to say it is very light and flimsy and the recharging cord very short. It only has a short life as a cordless, so really needs to be plugged in if you are going to use it for more than 5 minutes at a time because it doesn’t have an on-off switch that I could find! So, unless you are working very close to the power source, it is a bit difficult to use. Because it is so light and the cord so short, it doesn’t like staying put on the table while plugged in and after having it a mere 3 days, mine slithered off the table and on to the tiled floor, landed on the nozzle and that was that! It still works but is no longer a precision model.

 As usual the magpie in me has got the better of me and I’ve used shiny card which hasn’t photographed well with flash photography. I have now made a light box out of a large clear 4 litre plastic container ($4)  and two desk lamps ($9 each plus $6 for two globes) placed shining inwards at the sides of the box. With a sheet of white paper taped to the back and bottom of the box, I now  have a mini light box/studio for less than $30. The great thing is the lamps store in the plastic container! So much cheaper than buying one purpose built, and a whole lot easier than the tutorials I saw where people cut the sides out of cardboard boxes and taped fabric over the holes. There is a tutorial on this here