Friday, October 2, 2009

WCD Challenge #1 - make an entirely red card

This one was a bit trickier than I anticipated... the rules say to use red and ONLY red. Not red background with a coloured pattern on it... it has to be red on red. I rummaged through my scrap box and found that I had more pieces of red paper than I thought I did... and in the end I came up with two very simple cards. Sometimes simple is the best.

My first card plays off the New Year theme - I have a nice big dragon punch in my punch drawer and I found a negative image I'd punched out for something else (the darkest cardstock is nice thick textured CS), which gave me the idea. Red is the traditional colour for good luck to the Chinese people, and you'll see a lot of red and gold around the Chinese New Year. I had to skip the gold here... but the card works anyway. I wanted to stamp on the tag, but I didn't have any ink that would show up effectively on the red cardstock - my red ink is too light and it just faded into the background, and darker colours just looked black or brown. Not to mention smeary because acrylic stamps work best with the quick-dry black ink! So I grabbed a red pen and hand-wrote my tag, and then I finished it with a couple of little red hearts for a touch of bling, and a tangle of shiny red fibers.


My second card uses some patterned paper that was red-on-red. Somebody or other gave me the big red butterfly in a swap and it just happened to be an exact match to a piece of cardstock I had, so that was my card background decided! I decided that this one would be a romantic card, so I punched a ring of hearts around the edge of the red circle and mounted it on popdots.
I still needed a greeting, and I wanted to use something that would stand out more than hand-writing, so I coloured in a gold greetings sticker with a red permanent marker and let it dry. It still looks shiny metallic, but now it's red... Hopefully this is another simple, effective all-red card. I still have more patterned paper to play with so there may be more coming down the pipeline, but I ran out of glue! No more cards for me until I've been to the store for another gluestick. I use Elmers Extra-Strength Disappearing Craft Gluesticks for almost everything. It dries quickly, sticks very well, and doesn't make a big mess... plus I can make roughly 100 cards from one gluestick so at three bucks a stick it's pretty cost-effective!

This Challenge is brought to you by Sandy of Operation Write Home. If you want to play along, the Challenge thread is here.We'd love to see what you come up with! I'll be posting more Challenges as I get them done... but first off to the store!

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