KJBStamping (Planners and Crafts)

Hey everyone, it's Jes today, back with a fun watercolored set of cards! Happy first day of spring! Here in Indiana it's a lovely (read: freezing) sunny day, with a high of 43 degrees. A perfect day to stay inside and craft. Today, I'm going to show you a set of cards that I made to keep in my bag. I've often wished I had a pretty, blank card for various occasions, but never seemed to have one on hand. That inspired me to make this set of cards to have on hand.

This is what my final four looked like. There were five, but I really messed up on one, badly! I gave that one to my daughter. For this project you'll need watercolor paper (cut to size), a pretty stamp set, card bases of your choice, embossing powder and ink, a heat tool, and your favorite watercolor medium (I like to use tombow markers and water brushes).

(see below for links to everything I used.)

I chose to use the Flutterby stamp set from Lawn Fawn for my decorations. The cards are from Michaels. When I got this stamp set I knew it would be perfect for embossing and watercoloring. I loved all the detail.

Step one: Emboss a pretty design in the bottom corner of each pre-cut piece of water color paper. I used a silver embossing powder from the Michael's Recollection collection. Stamp the image with the embossing ink of your choice, sprinkle the powder on, and heat set. I love the shimmery look of this powder. I like to work in sections when I'm doing multiple cards. Here are all the cards after embossing. (See the blue one? That's the one that became a major fail. Maybe someday I'll do a #fail blog post just for kicks.)

My next step was to add a water colored background on each card. I found a technique on Youtube (link below) called ink smooshing and I couldn't wait to try it. I used my fiskars stamp press as a base. I scribbled on it with my Tombow markers. Make sure to leave the corner where your design is blank. Then, sprinkle some water on the stamp press just to wet the colors and make it easy to transfer.

Lay your paper over the ink and press down. Leave it a few seconds to really soak up the water. Then, peal it off very carefully. There will be some water pooling on the edges. Just dab it off with a paper towel.

I like to let my cards dry a bit before I tape them down to my work surface. That way, the color on the corners doesn't come up or pool when I take the tape off later. It is much easier to color the designs if your project is taped down.

Next, I used my tombow markers and water brushes to add color to each of the flowers and butterflies on the cards.

This part was kind of time consuming, but it was my favorite part. I got braver and experimented more with color as I moved from card to card. Here is a close up of each of the final four cards.