Group of Seven - Floating Frames

Hi everybody.  I'm back with this month's technique over at the Group of Seven Cardmakers and have made a card using a new lower case alphabet set from Card Making Magic and also a squirrel stamp from a set called Christmas Animals by the RSPB both being used for the first time.  This set of stamps is very versatile as the animals are woodland creatures so not merely something to use on winter/seasonal cards.

The floating frame gives lots of dimension and I merely cut the letters for 'happy birthday' out twice and coloured one set using Salty Ocean Distress Ink blending with a brush, and added these randomly over the frame which I had cut using two sizes of a set of Torn Edge Squares which I've used on a couple of fairly recent cards.  It is also useful to have some Press-n-Seal so that when you have laid out the images on the card you can place a piece of this over the top and it holds everything down in place whilst you die cut the frame, but I decided that my card is 300gsm and with the extra pieces of alphabet also cut from the same card my machine would not handle that thickness well, so I decided to cut the frame and then add the letters onto the frame keeping them in place with the Press-n-Seal so that I could then turn the letters over still stuck to that whilst I then stuck the dimensionals to the letters and then placed that down onto the frame all in one go to stick it all down at once when I had it in the correct postion, lifting it away from the letters when stuck firmly down on the card frame.  I then infilled around the letters with bits of the white alphabet just to fill in some gaps.  In fact there weren't that many gaps as the letters I used were quite large and close together, and with hindsight perhaps slightly smaller letters might have worked better, and unfortunately I had to cut most of the tails off the two 'ys' so they do look rather like 'vs', but would have been much more fiddly to stick, as even this size of letters took quite a time to fix in place.  I did make it more difficult for myself with partial letter which I had to cut to fit the torn edge, and in future I think I would stick to using a straight edge to line up with.  I finished by adding the sweet little squirrel onto a separate piece of card stamping with a coordinating blue ink and then heat embossed with WOW Clear Gloss Embossing Powder, and I then glued this in place behind the aperture.

This technique is quite effective and you can of course stamp and colour some images and then cut them out with a corresponding die, or fussy cut by hand which would be more time consuming, but at present I am still hampered by my sore hand and wrist which is improving but still aches when I'm using it a lot, and I did add a bit of extra darker colour to the squirrel using a pencil as I decided the inked outline was a little pale, but having to press down when colouring is still not comfortable so kept that to a minimum.

There are a couple of videos to watch over at the Group of Seven and also the other ladies have made some wonderful cards to take a look at and you can find out more from their own blogs too, and there is a link so any cards you make using this technique can be added for us all to enjoy.  

Thank you for coming to visit me here today and I'll see you again soon.

I am entering the following challenges:

The Male Room Challenge - No. 195 Monochrome.

NBUS Challenge - Where we use our Never Before Used Schtuff.