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Sunday 30 October 2011

Pink and Green

Interesting colour combinations are one of the most enjoyable aspects of card-making for me. The inspiration for them comes from so many sources: the preferences of the person the card is for, the colours in a paper, image or embellishment or those suggested by a theme. Sometimes the combination is challenging, particularly those that I haven't used before or wouldn't usually think of putting together, and at other times they just seem natural and irresistible. This month's Crafter's Companion Challenge fell into the latter category: pink and green is one of my favourite combinations, due, I think, to its prevalence in nature.


I made this card for my niece's eighth birthday, which was earlier this week. It uses quite bold shades of lime green and a deep purply-pink. The combination of its design and theme (cats) is one that I've been evolving over about a year now. Although I was happy at the time with each of its first two incarnations, it was the third, which was a birthday card for a similar aged girl about a month ago, that I felt was when I got it just right. (The three previous cards are at the bottom of this post.) I only tweaked that third card slightly for this fourth card. I think this will be the last time that I use the design for a cat-based card, as I've run out of cat obsessed friends and family, but I can imagine revisiting the layout for a different theme. Not really sure why I've only used the layout for cat cards up to now ...

The cat embellishments are Papermania die-shapes, very aptly titled "Fun Cats", each of which I heat embossed three time to give them gloss and depth. It's quite a fiddly process for such small pieces but worth the effort and I find an emery board is very useful to smooth down any rough edges. As has become my habit for cards recently, I attached one of the circles (bottom left) to a 5 mm strip of acetate, and tucked the other end behind the backing card, to provide some additional dimension and movement.

These are the three earlier versions of this card theme and content, which have been made separately over the course of about a year. Seeing them together like this (for the first time), I find it interesting - and encouraging - how the layout and techniques have developed over time, but surprising that the colour combination has varied so little.