All About Layering 1 (AECP)

Hi there, I'm back today with a card for my latest assignment from the AECP - All About Layering 1 Online Cardmaking Class which was taught by Nicole Picadura. She takes you through how to line up your layering stamps properly and shares tips and tricks to make the alignment a lot easier. Nicole takes you through many of the layering stamp sets, so if you decide to do the class, expect to see lots of floral beauties.

I think the biggest thing I learned from doing the All About Layering 1 Online Cardmaking Class is that your final projects don't have to be perfect. When you give yourself a bit of freedom around the stamping of your creations and let them go outside of the lines, they still look lovely, artsy in fact. I love the artsy look. I just find it challenging to let go if you know what I mean. I'm sure this programme will help me with that!

What I love about Altenew layering stamps is that even if you can't colour/don't want to colour, you can create some beautiful cards. I love colouring, and I love colour so the layering sets mean that I get to pull out loads of gorgeous coloured ink and play! I'd never used layering stamps until I bought some sets from Altenew. I love how quick and simple they are, and all of the colour combinations you can make.

I recently bought loads of the Altenew mini-ink cubes, and I have to say I absolutely love them! They are slightly strange at first because they seem to stamp blotchy but once they've dried the colour is gorgeous. They make the whole layering process so much easier too because they are divided into colour families. You have four colours in each set, all in varying tones, from light to dark. This completely takes the guesswork out of your project.

I decided to swatch my little ink cubes, and the tins I store them in, plus I made some cute little tags. Swatching on tags is great because you can flick through them and get inspiration. It's a fabulous project to do too if you want to do something creative but you're not full of design ideas. If you'd like to see my process and final results for my ink cube swatches/tags, let me know and I will do a post about it.

So, onto the card. My card for this assignment is a clean and simple card using masking and the Bride To Be stamp and die set. I don't do masking that much. I'm not sure why really as it's great fun. I wanted to see what different designs I could create with this set so started with this CAS card, and for my next assignment, also coming later today, I made a dimensional card.

If you're not familiar with masking, here's how it works. You stamp your image twice, once on your card base, and once on a post-it note (or another sticky-backed piece of paper). You then fussy cut (cut by hand rather than die-cut) the image right up to the line. See the image below:

You then stick the cut-out image on top of the image you have just stamped. Because the image is now covered, you can stamp another image over the top of it which will make it seem as though it's behind your original image. Once you've stamped the image, you can then remove the mask for another time. You keep repeating this process until you've finished your design.

For this design, I decided to stamp the full image on scrap paper first. I wanted to make sure that I had each of the elements in the right place before stamping onto my heavier duty card stock. If you look closely at the photo on the right (where I stamped onto scrap paper) you'll see that I simply stamped each flower over the top of the next one. I didn't need to use a mask at this point as it was just a way of me figuring out the overall design I was aiming for.

I used two mini cube sets - Rose Petal & Green Valley as you can see in the photo below.

Once I'd created all of the masks I needed, it was a simple case of just stamping each of the flower/leaves in varying colours, using the masks to cover up the flowers and create depth. I wrapped this card up by adding a nice black sentiment, 'Feel better soon', from the Bamboo Rose set. I resisted my urge to add any embellishments, as I had set myself a personal challenge of creating a one-layered card.

For my card for All About Layering 2, I used the same set, Bride To Be, and went all out on dimension, as you'll see in my next post.

I hope you like my one-layered card. It was fun to play with the masking technique again. Let me know what your favourite technique is in the comments section below.

Until next time, thanks for popping by!

Supplies Used:

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