Hello crafty friends. We’ve got a new theme for you at Alphabet Challenge – today we’ve reached the letter U and we want to see Uplifting thoughts on your cards. I took the opportunity to play a bit more with the new Fabric Strip Card and doing something different with a bargello technique, which I’ve never tried before. It’s inspired by quilting patterns, but uses strips of paper or card to build the patterns.

So for these cards, I trimmed off the edges of the fabric strip pattern (I used those pieces for another card – check it out here) and then cut across the solid stripes I was left with to give me stripey strips! I then layered them onto a small square of stencil card, offsetting the pattern to form a chequerboard design.

I used my guillotine to cut the edges straight, then simply attached it to a 5×5 card blank on which I’d already embossed a frame with a square embedder and a ball tool. I mounted one of the Pinky Gray word stickers onto a bit of co-ordinating companion paper as the final flourish, not adding anything else as I didn’t want to detract from the pattern.

I had enough card left to cut a second set of strips , this time layering them up into more of a ‘bridge’ pattern and using some of the pieces I trimmed from the bottom to fill in the corners at the top. That’s the only problem with these designs – you need your strips to be longer than the base you’re mounting them on, otherwise you end up with a very small topper by the time you’ve trimmed the edges straight! For this one I simply added a mount of black card and a black Pinky Gray word sticker.

I’m definitely going to try this technique again. The Fabric Strip Card was ideal, as I’d already got the stripes printed on the card, but you could use any papers just by cutting them up first, gluing the strips onto a base card and then slicing them crossways. Watch this space…