I am a big Jane Austen nerd. I love her sassy, humorous
writing and her tongue-in-cheek observations about gender interactions in
Regency era England. Miss Austen’s writing was brave for its time, yet is still
pleasant to read even today. Naturally following my love of Jane Austen’s writing
is my love of Austen-related papercrafting items. My collection of known
Austen-themed stamps is just about complete, and sometimes I make sets of cards
for the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA) just to do something
productive with them. This month, I decided it was time for some Austen
crafting, and sat down to make a set of 6 “thank you” cards for JASNA.
When I started these cards, it was with the idea that I
would use a die cut panel over a contrasting paper, both adhered to a
coral-colored card base. I happen to have a bunch of the coral card bases, and
few uses for them under ordinary circumstances. Appropriately, I decided to use
paper from the
“Dear Jane” cardstock stack by DCWV for the die cut panel, using a Spellbinders Ornate Squares die.
The paper I chose was a 12 x 12 coated green paper with pink rose and metallic
gold filigree accents, with background text from “Sense and Sensibility” printed in a
slightly darker green. For the background contrasting paper, I originally
choose some old time-darkened encyclopedia pages a friend and I scored at a
going-out-of-business rummage sale. However, once I trimmed the margins from
the pages and cut them to size for my panels, I realized the two papers
together were much too busy. The cut encyclopedia pages went into my scrap
drawer, where I found some very thin white tissue salvaged from recent mail
order packaging. With the swap of tissue for encyclopedia paper also came the
addition of lace and ribbon.
On to the fun part: putting it all together. Thankfully, I’m
not as much of a perfectionist in papercrafting as I used to be, because I
royally messed up the look of the tissue paper base layer by gluing it down
with Beacon 3-in-1 liquid glue. My rationale was that everything else on this
card would be adhered to the tissue base layer, so the tissue needed to have a
firm hold on the card base. After the liquid glue fail on a few cards, I next
tried my Tombow adhesive runner. Nope. That showed through the tissue just as
badly. Next up: glue stick. Guess what works well with tissue paper? Glue
sticks. Now I know. Now you know, too, and hopefully have been saved some
tissue-papercrafting frustration.
While I waited for the tissue adhesives to dry, I used jet
black StazOn ink to stamp a thank you sentiment from
Papertrey Ink’s SimplyJane stamp set onto the die cut coated paper and added some champagne-colored
rhinestones. The last time I stamped on coated paper, I didn’t have any StazOn
ink and used Versafine instead, thinking it much less likely to smear than pigment
ink. A
WEEK later, I still had to
handle the images carefully to avoid smearing! While waiting, I also used the
coordinating die set to cut out a pair of Regency-dressed female silhouettes
from dark gold DCWV Glitzy Glimmer paper glued to a stronger paper base.
Once the tissue base layer was down and dry, I
(successfully) used Beacon liquid glue to affix a layer of wide lace right down
the middle of the card, then topped it with a thin coral ribbon. Over the lace
and ribbon, I glued the stamped die cut down and added a little script washi
tape to the top prior to adding the silhouette die cuts with pop dots.
