Stampin’ Up Mosaic Madness Card 1

I recently acquired some beautiful Stampin’ Up equipment which will encourage me to make more cards – not something I really enjoy doing but needs must! Included in this new stash was the Mosaic Madness set which includes some stamps, a punch and an embossing folder. All these things work together and are interchangeable, and the potential for variation is endless – looking online I have discovered that you can create regular patterns like Moroccan tiles, or go completely random – you can even go 3-D with them! The shapes are beautiful and I am looking forward to exploring the possibilities.

This week is my sister’s birthday and after being poorly all last week with a throat infection and not able to do anything much, the deadline was suddenly upon me and I had to make a card quickly.

Here are the materials and equipment I used to create the card.

I decided to use some things already in my possession. The background paper came from a small A-6 pad of decorative papers from Sizzix which I have had for more years than I can remember, with only a few sheets having been used.

(You can see how old it is from the picture of the antiquated embossing machine on the bottom left of the picture!!) I found a nice mottled background paper:

I used the Mosaic Madness embossing folder to create a lovely background. I wanted to ink the raised pattern, and gently rubbed my Broken China distress ink pad over it, but made a terrible mess with lines from the edge of the pad etc.! I was about to chuck it out, but thought I might be able to rescue it, if not for this project, then for another, so I swiped it again with the Fired Brick distress ink pad and came up with this:

which has actually turned out really nice! It’s gone in the Backgrounds folder for the time being.

Some time ago I made some little ink blending pads, using the wooden blocks from some old rubber stamps I’d unmounted, and glued on some cut-n-dry foam. You can see this just below the paper pad in the top photo. I used this very, very gently to ink the raised embossing on a fresh background sheet, using Broken China distress ink, and was pleased with the results.

Using a selection of the Mosaic Madness stamps, I used a mixture of sepia archival ink, Broken China and Fired Brick distress inks – to achieve a more subtle shade of the latter, I stamped off most of the ink onto scrap paper before re-stamping, and I then cut out the shapes using the Mosaic Madness punch. (I forgot to put the punch in the first photo…) I love how all these things work together!

I used one of the small stamps to print a small shape in the centre of some of the shapes on the embossed background, and then added more small shape stamping onto some of the larger shapes, and then glued these shapes using Pinflair glue gel to provide some dimension.

As you can see from the rejected background sheet, the paper was just too large to be completely embossed by the embossing folder in the Cuttlebug. I trimmed off the excess, and then reduced the sheet some more, and made a border from the trimmed off sections, to go down the right hand side of the card. This is the finished result.

The sentiment stamp was also from Stampin’ Up – this time from the Perfectly Penned set – quite beautiful, and with several different ones which are all going to be useful!

I kept this card relatively simple, and avoided doing my usual inked background sheet – I didn’t even distress the edges. It was hard to restrain myself but this card was a radical departure from my usual style, as I am trying to discipline myself to be able to create a card in a single sitting, so that I can restock my card stash, and then devote the time for the things I prefer to do. The Stampin’ Up stuff that I have now got will certainly enable me to do this, as it enables one to be incredibly versatile. Limiting the colour palette to two colours is helpful, too.

Here is the inside, which you can see echoes the same theme:

This time the sentiment was stamped using the Fired Brick distress ink.

Finally, a couple of detail shots of the card:

You can see that the final touch was to add a small bead of Stickles glitter glue in the colour Fruit Punch, to add a subtle touch of bling.

(I made a video of the process, but it is not yet edited, and I am experiencing some problems with my software at the moment. If I can resolve this problem, I will edit this post with the video in due course,)