Welcome back to the craft room and today’s St. Patrick’s Day Lucky Shamrock Card post. I love this time of year when I can celebrate my Irish heritage. I’ve been listening to Celtic music all week now and was inspired to create a St. Patrick’s Day card. Let me show you what I made!
Die Cut Shamrock and Sentiment
While my die cutting collection is rather extensive, I do not own a shamrock die. Never fear, the Cricut Explore Air 2 is near! I began my search over on one of my favorite crafty sites, Creative Fabrica. I found the Clovers 3 file which is perfect for this project and downloaded it to my computer. In Cricut Design Space I resized the SVG file and made a few duplicates in both green and gold. The two colors in Design Space tell the system that I will be cutting different colors of the chosen material. The green card is 65lb from Recollections and the gold glitter card is from the Holiday Glitz Glitter pad, also by Recollections.
The sentiment for the card was cut with the Tim Holtz Alphanumeric Shadow Upper die set. My original idea was to use both card stocks, the gold for the shadow and the green for the inner portion of the letters. While trying to separate the glitter card from the dies, I remembered my love/hate relationship with this stuff. As you can see in the second image below the glitter layer peels right off the backer. In hopes of avoiding this situation, I ran the dies through my Sizzix Big Shot machine twice with an extra piece of copy paper for extra pressure. I still had to try to carefully separate the inner letter from the shadow. Rather than having to recut a few of the letters, I changed ideas and ditched the green portion all together. In the end a much nicer effect, I think.
The Background
Early on, I knew there would be both a green and gold glitter mats. What took a little while to decide was what to do with the Recollections cream colored mat. By itself, it looked rather plain and boring next to the glitter card. I looked through my embossing folders but nothing caught my attention, so I turned to my stencil book. On the second page I found the perfect one; a page full of mini rainbows! This stencil is from Vicki Boutin’s “Where To Next?” Collection. To stay with the bright sparkly feel of the card I used Mustard Seed Distress Ink with my Waffle Flower blending brushes.
The result is Amazing! So bright and pretty and just the right color. In order to keep the panel and the stencil in place I used a small piece of my Media Grip Mat by Tim Holtz. The strip of painters tape at the top of the stencil not only held it in place, it also acted as a hinge. This gave me the chance to make sure I had the ink coverage I needed. After letting the ink dry for a bit, I added a light application of Distress Micro Glaze over the entire panel. I have a dedicated domed blending foam from scrapbook.com that lives inside the jar, and the blending tool, also from scrapbook.com, is stored next to the jar, so I always have it when needed.
The Finished St. Patrick’s Day Card
When it was time to put the card together, I began with a piece of Recollections 110lb cream card for the base. The green mat layer was adhered to the gold glitter card with both Scor-tape and Art Glitter Glue. I wanted to make sure these layers stayed together. To adhere the background and the entire mat stack to the card base I felt confident just using Scor-tape. The Lucky sentiment and shamrocks were adhered with Art Glitter Glue. I also added a few highlights to the shamrocks with my Sakura white #10 Gelly Roll pen.
The sparkle from the gold card is just amazing in person but it just doesn’t photograph well. To add a bit of a surprise, I added one of the unused glitter shamrocks to the inside of the card. I’ve tucked the other two away for other projects.
Thank you for joining me for today’s St. Patrick’s Day Lucky Shamrock Card post. I really love how this card turned out, it is so bright. Have you made St. Patrick’s Day cards before? Even though we celebrate every year, this is my first card. I’ll have to see if I can top myself next year!! Have a fantastic week, and I will see you back in the craft room again soon!
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