Copper and Sepia Thank You Card

This evening I made a thank you card for a friend. She had seen my Mamhead album and admired one of the sepia tracing pages, so I made her a card based on the same photo and the same technique.

The photo doesn’t really do it justice unfortunately.

Here is the original photo.

I printed out the photo to the size I wanted for the card, and laid some parchment paper over the top and taped it down. I traced some of the outlines using a sepia pen.

I used copper Perfect Pearls from my Perfect Pearls palette to pick out some leaves and stems, with a fine watercolour brush.

I cut the two pieces of paper out with a craft knife, allowing a small amount extra of the parchment down the left side, which I folded under, and stuck to the back of the photo, so that the parchment tracing could be peeled back to reveal the photo, as I had done for the album – the album page was done in gold rather than copper.

This is a lovely technique because both layers enhance each other, and it makes the page (or card) interactive.

To finish the card I matted and layered the picture onto some copper metallic paper and some mottled brown paper from my stash, and mounted the whole thing onto a tent-folded piece of A5 pale yellow card.

I thought it needed something extra, so I found some silvery-grey “Thank You” sentiments in my stash box which I’d cut with my Cougar electronic cutting machine some time back – they tone really well with the parchment paper – and stuck them down using Scotch Quick-Dry Adhesive, and outlined them with the sepia pen. Using a home-made ink blending tool, I also sponged on some Tea Dye distress ink around the edges because the card base was showing a bit, and this definitely improves the appearance.

I added a tiny spot of two-way glue pen onto the top right corner of the photo – if you apply this glue and allow it to dry, it becomes like the glue on post-it notes. I did this to keep the tracing in place and to stop it flopping forwards. It can be peeled back to reveal the photo, and then repositioned. It did occur to me later that it might have been more sensible to attach the parchment piece at the top rather than at the side but I’ve been feeling pretty exhausted and brainfogged lately so put it down to that!

Earlier today I continued to work on my Infusions album, sticking the samples onto the flattened toilet rolls – I didn’t bother to photograph this because it really wasn’t very interesting – just a rather tedious, messy job! You can see when I started this the other day. This is my least favourite part of making an album. I seem to be making an awful lot of pages and I think there are too many for a single album and I am thinking about binding two or three separate ones into one large cover, which could be quite intriguing.

The latest pages are now under a stack of heavy books to flatten them.