Easter is one of the most joyous holiday seasons of the year that is often overshadowed, if not overlooked, by our noisy world. It’s a time full of courage, hope, and promise for those with faith in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
In preparation for this commemorative time, we are highlighting two meaningful stamp sets from our January–March catalog along with a few beautiful cards and a scrapbook page we made using them!
The first stamp set we’re looking at is called God Is Love and it is also offered with a coordinating set of Thin Cuts. Thin Cuts are metal dies that are used for cutting shapes out of paper when paired with a die-cutting machine.
The words and designs shown in black represent what you can stamp with our clear polymer stamps and the other shapes you see above are what can be cut with the Thin Cuts.
Using the God Is Love dies paired with a few simple techniques, this lovely scripture card came together with so much ease! One of the first things you might notice is that we didn’t use a lot of patterned paper. We only used one, to be exact, and very little of it at that. The intention was to focus on and not distract from the scripture message that takes up two thirds of the card’s front. The message was stamped in Wisteria ink, a color very similar to the Periwinkle cardstock on which it was stamped, creating a warm, almost tone-on-tone effect. The sentiment is resting on a bar of Ballerina cardstock. The bar below the sentiment is visually important because it creates a place for our eyes to rest after reading this passage, which is longer than typical for a card front. Finally, the card is embellished with gold accents and beautiful die-cut flowers, so that we have something pretty to look at as our eyes rest.
For added dimension, the edges of the layered petal pieces of the center flower were sponged with Ballerina ink, creating the illusion that the flower is at the forefront, when in reality it was attached in the same way, and without any foam tape, as was the second flower.
The God Is Love stamp and Thin Cuts set also comes in especially handy when you’re ready to scrapbook those meaningful religious themed memories!
Just like in the card, this layout was kept free of too many distracting patterns to really focus on the message and feeling behind the day these memories were made. It is still full of beautiful techniques, like the sponging of color in the background that ties the elements in the foreground together, leading the eye from one part of the layout to the next.
In this case, the flower petals were die cut from two different cardstock colors, White Daisy and Ballerina, adding to the flow and visual guide created by the ethereal Wisteria ink in the background. Our eyes begin at the top right, are guided left through the photos, matted on restful solid cardstock colors, and then the journaling, continuing to and stopping at the beautifully decorated cross on the bottom right of the page.
We chose to color the floral designs on the cross with alcohol markers, but color pencils or watercolor paint would be just as beautiful!
As a bonus note, the colors we chose for this card and layout may seem thematic for Easter, but if you’re also familiar with color theory, you will see that this card is made up of double complementary colors. (If you aren’t familiar with color theory, or would like to learn more, revisit a few of our past posts, here: For the Love of Color: A New Color Wheel!)
This next stamp set we absolutely love for Easter and for any time you may need to provide a friend with uplifting, faith filled comfort, is the I Am the Way stamp set.
We got bolder with this next card and used a good amount of patterned paper and a dark (Sapphire) cardstock. To ensure the stamped scripture wouldn’t get lost in our paper choices, we made it literally stand out by heat embossing it in gold! To heat emboss, you must use a clear ink that is designed for embossing, like VersaMark™ ink, and dust it with an embossing powder (we used Princess Gold). Once you clear off any powder that is not stuck to the embossing ink, you set the image with a heat tool that will literally melt the powder into the ink. The result is a stamped image that raises off the page!
Less of a technique, but perhaps a trick that we carry up our sleeves, are the acrylic stars that we used to embellish this card. These little golden stars started out white and were colored with the Liquid Gold metallic paint markers. We offer white acrylic stars, and other shapes, in our catalog for the express reason that white acrylic is easy to color and therefore match to the needs of your projects!
The taller, “I am the way…” scripture from this set is sized to fit on the front of the trendy slimline-style cards.
Our talented Creative Arts Manager, Karen Pedersen, shows how to recreate this amazing background in the video below!
Happy Easter!
