A Mother's Day card filled with flowers - bagatelasdepapel.com English

This year I’m really lucky because I get to congratulate my mom for Mother’s Day in person. My parents are visiting here in Galicia, Northwestern Spain (they live in Finland). I made her the following card:

A Mother's day card with inlay and embossing

“Grattis på Morsdagen”, as you might imagine, means “Happy Mother’s Day (it’s in Swedish, the language that mom and I communicate in) It’s embossed in white, but I didn’t use a stamp… I used my printer! Keep reading and I’ll explain how I made it…

Once again I’ve used the inlay technique that I’m so fond of…

Although I’m not a flower person, I love this set of Die-namics dies! It has so many pieces, that if you run them through your Big Shot just once, you have enough to make a whole bouquet.

Now on to the tutorial:

I used a 5.5″ x 5.5″ white cardbase to be able to fit the flowers perfectly. The blue panel measures 5″ x 5″.

My first idea was to inlay the grass (that’s why the panel is cut in the pictures), but I didn’t like the result so I ended up gluing a strip that I die cut partially using the “Fresh cut grass” Die-namics die in the foreground.

1. The first thing that I did, after cutting the cardbase and panel was to adhere the stem dies to the panel with strips of washi tape (the cheap stuff) and roll it through my Big Shot:

Dies attached to card panel with washi tape

2. The next step was to use the same dies to cut light green cardstock for the inlaid stems.

3. I cut a piece of thin printer paper down to 4.9″ x 4.9″ and covered it with double-sided tape:

4. I attached the printer paper to the back of my panel and inserted the die-cuts in their corresponding spots (much easier than trying to put glue on the thin stems, don’t you think?):

5. Once the stems were inserted, I attached the flower dies to the panel once again using washi tape:

6. The next step was to die cut the flowers for the background and the flowers and stems for the foreground out of colored cardstock (sorry, I didn’t take any pictures).

So that it would be easy to adhere the stems to the foreground, I used double-sided 2″ Sookwang tape on the back of the dark green cardstock before die-cutting them.I used thin 3D foam squares to adhere the flowers in the foreground and applied a bit of Clear Wink of Stella and Glossy Accents to some of the circles. They turned out like this:

Now let’s make the sentiment…

I discovered this technique (but soon found out that I didn’t invent it) a couple of months ago when I was making gift card holders for a store and wanted to print the name of the store on vellum. It was taking very long for the ink to dry and I had an “aha moment”. I sprinkled gold embossing powder on it and it adhered perfectly to the ink! Yay, a new way to make beautiful personalized sentiments!7. I wrote the phrase with differents fonts in the needed size (it had to fit a 0.5″ x 5.5″ strip) using Photoshop, but you can also use a text editor like Word. I recommend a skinny font since this technique gives the text a bold effect.

8. I rubbed my anti-static powder pouch on the vellum before inserting it in the printer:

9. I printed the sentiments (I only had yellow ink, that’s why you can see some yellow spots on the next picture) and quickly sprinkled them with white embossing powder.

As you can see, the rollers of my printer were really dirty (or maybe it just isn’t compatible with vellum) and I had to use a paint brush to get rid of all that extra embossing powder:

Cleaning the extra embossing powder with a brush.

10. After using my heat tool…

here’s the result:

Close up of printed and embossed sentiments.

It’s not perfect, but you can always retouch the text with a white gel pen…11. The last step was to trim the chosen sentiment to a 0.5″ x 5.5″ strip , score the ends of it and glue them to the back of the strip of grass before adhering it to the card with 3D foam squares.

Voilá, here’s another look at the finished card!