Welcome to the second part of our Birthday Blossoms series. The birth flowers for February are Iris, Primrose and Violet, giving me a strong yellow and purple color scheme for both cards. The distinctive and easily
Welcome to the second part of our Birthday Blossoms series. The birth flowers for February are Iris, Primrose and Violet, giving me a strong yellow and purple color scheme for both cards.
The distinctive and easily recognizable shape of and iris made it a perfect candidate for quilling. Once again I called upon the considerable talents of my daughter Garcia to produce a quilled iris for me and she did not let me down.
The base is a standard A6 white card blank, matted with a piece of cream card that has been embossed with the Flourishes embossing folder and inked around the edges with Violet pigment ink. I die cut purple card and a slightly smaller piece of yellow card using Spellbinders curved border dies to create the centre panel and mounted the quilled iris onto this. The iris is made from different colored 3mm quilling paper strips. A Small Text Happy Birthday peel off in gold and some Purple Candy Stickers finish off the card.
The second card for this month was a bit more complicated to make and gave me the chance to try out a technique that I had been reading about to create the patterned background.
I started with a standard A6 Cream Card Blank and then made the patterned background.
Wax Resist Background
I read about this technique on a blog called Creative Expressions by Carol Sweeney, here is my version of her description.
You will need some wax paper, I used ordinary kitchen waxed paper which I bought in the supermarket. Cut a piece of the waxed paper the same size as your embossing folder, or a little bigger and emboss the waxed paper using your die cutting or embossing machine as you would any other piece of card or paper. When you take the wax paper out of the embossing folder you will be able to see the pattern on it. Cut two pieces of card to the size that you want your background to be and sandwich the wax paper between them. Heat your iron to it’s hottest temperature but turn off the steam and iron the card/wax paper sandwich. In Carol’s description she emphasizes the need to hold one half of the card and iron the other and then switch over to prevent the wax paper from moving round and blurring. I wasn’t careful enough with my first attempt and there were patches left with no pattern on, so make sure that you hold the card firmly whilst ironing. On my second attempt I ironed too much and again had areas with no pattern, but third time lucky I ran the hot iron over the card a couple of times and it worked well.
I got the impression from Carol’s description that the wax pattern would be on both pieces of card, however, mine only transferred to one of the pieces so maybe I misunderstood that bit. If you hold the card to the light you will be able to see the pattern has been transferred in wax to your card.
I used a Foam Ink Blending Tool to rub ink all over the card to reveal the pattern as the ink sticks to the card and not the wax. If you don’t have and ink blending tool you can ink the card directly from the ink pad but you may need to use a tissue to remove excess ink from the waxed areas. I used Spellbinders Flowers and Leaves embossing folder and Tim Holtz Bundled Sage distress ink for this card.
The Rest of the Card
Once made, I adhered the patterned background piece to the card blank and adhered a strip of Burlap Hessian Ribbon over the background. I used an Oval Frame die cutting stencil to cut a cream card shape and stamped this with Violet pigment ink using the Hero Arts Happy Stamp and Cut Set.
The primroses are made using Petaloo Paintable Flowers, I used two sizes of primrose shaped flowers and colored them with marker pens adding a 3mm Pale Gold Adhesive Pearl to the centre of each. Purple Paper Flowers are the violets and leaves die cut with the Paper Smooches Foliage 2 set complete the card.
I hope you like these two cards, the colors are very spring like just perfect for a birthday in February.
Debbie x
Hi Deb both are beautiful cards. Thank you for sharing the wax tip, I too have tried this in the past with mixed results. I was really surprised to see that the name Iris meant rainbow in the Greek language. I absolutely adore greece and rainbows. Both words hold a special place in my heart. X
Hi Carol thank you for your comments you are very kind. The wax resist took a few goes but i was very happy with it in the end and will be using it again in the future. Wenspent several very happy years living in Cyprus so all things Greek are very dear to me too!!