Adding Acetate to Kick Your Flowers Up A Notch!

This post was sponsored by Simon Says Stamp. Thanks, Simon!

Hi there! Jennifer McGuire is just full of excellent ideas, isn’t she? I feel lucky to have such a talented friend! (She gives amazing hugs!) We all get inspiration from her so frequently, and I find her use of acetate to create unique card fronts to be so intriguing and unique! This project is kind of a piggyback on my card from earlier this week, in which I used black A7 Thin Frames die to accent my floral background. Today, I’m using an acetate background to create a super special wedding card, adding some more A7 Thin Frames to help ground the flower on the acetate so that it’s not floating in midair. Let’s get started with the details!

It is such a thrill to me to see how many stamp sets I’ve illustrated over the last few years; I never dreamed that I would be able to use my own drawings to create cards when I started this journey 14 years ago, but I don’t think that I have words to describe what it means to me when I see artists whom I admire so much using my illustrations. Debby Hughes is one such artist; I’ve admired her work for nearly as long as I’ve been stamping, and she painted my Thankful Magnolia image so splendidly… I audibly gasped when I saw it. She was so good as to send that treasure to me, and I have had her card sitting on my desk as an inspiration. I finally made/found the time to do my own watercolored version of the Thankful Magnolia for today’s card! It’s a double whammy of inspiration from those cardmakers whom I admire the most!

To start, I stamped the Thankful Magnolia on some Arches Cold Press Watercolor Paper using Hero Arts’s Contour Ink. I then did some watercolor mixing and matching to create this peach melba magnolia. (I don’t believe that’s really a thing, but how perfect is that description for this peach and raspberry magnolia?) After I’d finished watercoloring the image, I die cut it with the coordinating die. I knew that I wanted to have a peach background to highlight the peachy undertones on the flower, so I selected my peach cardstock from my stash and outline the edge of the die cut with the coordinating Copic marker to keep the color palette seamless.

Once I had finished coloring my main floral image, I cut down a panel of peach cardstock to 7×5.5 inches. I used my Altenew Scoring Board to score 1/2″ in from the edge, creating a 5×7 card with a tiny flap along the long side. I used some super strong double sided tape to adhere a 5″x7″ panel of acetate to the thin flap, creating an A7 card with a transparent front! To accent the peachy magnolia, I die cut the A7 Thin Frames using some Metallic Rose Gold foil cardstock from Simon Says Stamp. I keep my Thin Frames dies together as they arrived in the package; this allows me to have a huge variety of sizes in two different widths with one pass through my die cut machine! I added one thicker frame closer to the edge and a thinner one more towards the center. This addition of the frames adds a little interest to the clear background as well as a bit of sturdiness to the acetate.

For the greeting, I die cut the So Happy For You Both die from another piece of Metallic Rose Gold foil cardstock (isn’t that shade of metallic blush divine?) and backed it with the outline layer cut from vellum. I popped the magnolia up with some foam tape, then popped up the greeting with some clear dimensional adhesive. The vellum behind the foil sentiment allows the greeting to pop a bit from the background while still keeping the overall feeling of lightness on the finished card! Finally, I added a few peachy iridescent gems for one last bit of sparkle.

Well, that’s all for my project today! I am so excited about how this first acetate card came out… I can’t wait to try it on another project! Thanks so much for stopping by, and have a marvelous day!