Thursday, May 12, 2016

Never Ending Square Greeting

It is possible to make this card without a die but I am a gadget girl and Inky Antics made this die which called my name:
Oh boy, this was fun! For a full description and video, click this link: Never Ending Square Die or continue reading for my experience.

First off, you begin with a half sheet of regular copier paper. This is going to be folded a lot and thicker paper such as card stock isn't going to be as pliable. I began with white paper. If you are a card maker, you will recognize the size and fold of a basic A2 card.
The card's crease is placed on the design edge of the die. Those flowers and doodads could be used on the card or on another project but I did not use them.
After running it through my die cutter (Big Shot), and creasing on the folds, this is the shape I had:
Per directions, I added adhesive to the upper and lower opposite corners and adhered those squares to their neighbor, according to the fold lines.
 Almost looks like the "Cootie Catchers" many of us made as kids, right?
There was nothing wrong with the white creation but I wanted a little contrast in my finished project so I went through the same steps with blue copier paper. I cut four 2.5" squarea of white card stock for the stamped images below.

Each of these images would be cut into quarters to fit on the quadrants of the blue card base. I placed the images with those cuts in mind. I missed clearly stamping the tip of the cat's tail but that was corrected with a fine line black marker.

The cat with Knit Happens and the dog with Hello Friend are both stamps from Taylored Expressions (cat: Grouchy Grumplings TEMD44 and dog: If Dogs Could Talk TEMD40). The ball of yarn and Just Unwind are from Avery Elle, Made with Love ST-14-35. The gumball and Bless Chew are from Stamps of Life, Bubble Gum 4 Me.

I added double sided tape to the back of each colored square. This particular Sookwang tape was exactly the right width. After backing each square, I cut each one into fourths, peeled off the backing and applied them to the card base. At this point you really need to watch the video above to watch how the card works. Even if I could take a decent video of it, I couldn't do it one handed. Here are the four finished faces of my card:




Coloring was done with Prismacolor pencils. The glass part of the gum ball has a clear Gelly Roll pen layer over it for a bit of sheen and both black and clear Wink of Stella pens on the black and red parts for a bit of interest. 

I will definitely make this card again. I think patterned papers and one small stamp or photo would be cute on the faces of this card, but I really like this version with the images and phrases revealing as they do.

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