Austen Card Set 2

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.

For the final embellishment, I painted some wooden laser-cut heart with Martha Stewart metallic gold paint, and glued them over the lace and bottom of the green die cut.

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