Sometimes I get so caught up in all of the beautiful dies, fancy tools, and coloring media available these days, I forget how nice it is to just sit down with some stamps and ink. And truth be told, most of the people I give cards to could care less how much dimension, texture, and shading I achieved…they notice it’s pretty, but really they’re looking to see what I wrote inside. So today, I went back to basics with some lighter weight cardstock, ink, and older stamp sets from my stash to make this set of simple one-layer notecards.
Each card in the set began the same way – trimming some 80lb. Cougar White Super Smooth Cardstock in half and scoring to form a top-folding A2 card base, masking off either an inch or half-inch of the edges of card with Post-It tape, and inking that center rectangle with Distress Inks to form either a light one-color background or a vibrant sunset blend. (Inks blend great on this cardstock because of that super smooth finish.)
Eighty-pound cardstock may seem a bit lightweight for a card base, but I think it works perfectly for simple notecards like these. If you’re giving this set as a gift, there are no worries about whether the recipient will be able to stick them in the mail without additional postage.
Once I had inked up just a simple rectangular background on this card with Tumbled Glass Distress Ink (color concentrated around the edges with almost no inking in the center), I stamped the image from the Color Layering Orchid in a Pot set by Hero Arts using several inks from Stampin’ Up (Smoky Slate, Baked Brown Sugar, Mossy Meadow, Old Olive, Pear Pizzazz, Pink Pirouette, Blushing Bride, Rose Red).
I repeated the same process with Antique Linen Distress Ink for this card and loved the result even more. Nice, crisp stamped sentiments on both cards were courtesy of Versafine Onyx Black ink.
Seedless Preserves, Picked Raspberry, and Dried Marigold Distress Inks were blended to form this sunset background. While I still had the Post-It Tape adhered to the card, I stamped an old field silhouette image from Inkadinkado on top of the inked background with Versafine Onyx Black ink. Peeling away the masked edges was kinda magical for this one!
Since the tree image was so large, I only masked a half-inch border off on this card before applying Blueprint Sketch, Seedless Preserves, and Picked Raspberry Distress Inks. And even though these old Inkadinkado stamps are acrylic (not “high-quality photopolymer”), I only needed to do a single impression with Versafine Onyx Black ink to achieve a solid image on this super smooth cardstock.
All in all, this set of four simple one-layer cards probably took me a little over an hour to create (and I am a SLOW card-maker…) and it was awfully refreshing to leave the gadgets and expensive supplies behind for a while. Do you feel more creative when you limit the supplies you use?