Playing with Spellbinders!

Good morning! I have a couple of special posts for you this week… I recently had the opportunity to play with a few lovely dies from Spellbinders, and I’m going to share the projects with you today and tomorrow! Today, my card focuses on the lovely Poppies Card Creator (SP|SSS). The intricate die cut this die creates is truly stunning. Not only is the die cut itself lovely, but it also embosses the details on the flowers… so pretty.

I wanted to create a pretty, loose watercolored floral panel using the details embossed on the die cut as my guide. I started by die cutting the panel from some Arches watercolor paper, running it through my Vagabond a few times to ensure that all of those details were cut through cleanly. I then watercolored it with my Daniel Smith Quinacridone Pink, adding a second (or sometimes a third) layer of shading using the Quinacridone Pink mixed with a touch of Neutral Tint. The leaves were watercolored using Jadeite Genuine.

After watercoloring the panel, I knew that I wanted to pop up the die cut to help showcase some of that absolutely stunning detail from the die cut, so I trimmed a panel of Hero Arts woodgrain textured card stock and adhered the watercolored die cut to the woodgrain panel with dimensional adhesive. After I had adhered the florals down, I added a sentiment from a (sadly) discontinued Concord and 9th set and adhered it over the top of some flowers that had dissatisfying watercoloring. 😉 (I love that I can hide imperfections so easily with a cleverly placed sentiment!)

After adding the greeting, I adhered a black glitter strip to the edge of an A2 card base and adhered the woodgrain panel so that the black glitter just peeked out from the edge of the woodgrain panel. Now, there are some unofficial “rules” for designing which I’ve found particularly helpful, and the “rule of three” is probably one of my most used design techniques. Basically, the rule states that different elements on the front of a card should be in multiples of three to be the most visually appealing. For this card, I already had two black elements (the sentiment and the black glitter strip), so I needed to add a third. I decided to add some Twilight Rhinestones from Honey Bee stamps randomly interspersed here and there amongst the flowers.

That’s all for me today! I have a few more projects using Spellbinders products that I’m excited to share with you. Stay tuned! Have a marvelous day, friends!