Hello there! Today’s card is something a bit different from my usual style, but it’s always good to push yourself, don’t you think? I’ve got lots of offcuts of ClarityCrafts designer papers in my folders as I generally can’t bear to throw any of them away (and I suspect I’m not the only one!) I decided it was time to do something with a few of them when I saw the theme over at Just Add Ink this week – I’ve obviously gone with scraps & strips as my ‘choose two’, utilising the layout at Freshly Made Sketches

I thought the ‘Antarctica’ papers would work well for creating a sense of a landscape in the triangles, and the great thing about using papers from the same pack is that you know the colours will tone with each other (and as it’s one of my favourite paper sets, I’ve got lots of spare bits in the folder!)

I trimmed a base piece of white card to fit a 5×7 card blank and marked out the centre on the right with a pencil, together with the two points on the left to line up the paper strips. I cut the two patterned papers into strips 2cm wide (I could probably have made them a bit narrower – one for next time!) and then started by gluing the purple toned strips onto the bottom of the card. The trick with this is to start with the top piece, lining it’s edge with the pencil marks, and then work down, leaving a small gap between each one. I keep each strip longer than I need, then flip the card over and use scissors to trim them level with the edge of the card base. I then repeated the process with the blue/pink toned strips at the top, again starting with an edge across the two pencil marks and working outwards. Once the strips were trimmed down I attached the card base to the 5×7 card blank.

My original plan had been to stop there and just add a sentiment, but I felt it needed something a bit more. I fished out the ‘five dandelions’ aperture die and found a co-ordinating offcut in my ‘Waimea Falls’ companion papers. It wasn’t big enough to cut out the whole die, but that was fine as I just wanted to trim three of the dandelions out of the image, which I then glued onto the card front.

The final touch was one of the KISS word stickers, and that was it!

What do you think? I’ve got so many bits of designer paper that I could make a whole series of these – I’ll have to find some more layouts that work with paper strips. And the bonus thing here – no new sheet of paper was harmed during this creative process! 🤣