Final Project for Level 2 of AECP

I’m so excited to be sharing my final projects with you. For this round we had to choose any 3 components from the classes we have taken, explain the 3 components and use them in the cards. The cards we needed to create were four masculine cards: Birthday, Love/Thinking of You, Anniversary and Encouragement. We also had to do an Altered Item/Upcycled Project. I hope my cards and project meet the expectations. In this post, I’ll show my cards. In my next post I’ll show my Altered/Upcycled project. Thanks for looking.

So, the three components I chose were Stencil Techniques, Let it Shine, and Beyond Basic Backgrounds. Of course I used many other techniques such as ink blending, scene building and more. I chose to use the same color scheme for my cards so they looked like a set. I chose colors from the Lapis Lazuli and Nature’s Wonders set of die inks.

CARD 1 – Happy Birthday

For my first card, I used the Halftone Stencil. I wanted to have brown dots on a blue background. To do this, I was going to have to put clear embossing powder over the brown dots and heat set it so the embossed dots would resist the blue ink. First, I used a blending brush to ink the Nature’s Wonders colors from dark to light using the stencil. Then, I used Versamark ink and pressed it through the holes in the stencil to cover the ink I had already put down. This way I could then heat emboss the dots with clear embossing powder. I was able to then use a blending brush to ink the rest of the card blue.

Next, I stamped and die cut the Ice Cream. I wanted the Ice Cream to have some dimension so I die cut two more pieces out of white card stock and glued them together. I wanted the little carton the Ice Cream was in to be the same color blue as the rest of the card so I squished a little of the Eastern Sky ink onto my craft mat and used a paint brush with a tiny bit of water to “paint” the carton on the Ice Cream. My plan was to cut a circle out of the stenciled piece in which my sentiment would go. To do that,I placed my sentiment and die cut on the stenciled piece, where I though they should go. Then I put a circle die on the stenciled piece and taped down the die. Once the circle die was in place, I removed the sentiment and die and cut out the circle. I backed the stenciled piece with some fun foam. To get my sentiment lined up correctly, I put my card base in my MISTI and placed the stenciled piece where it would go on the card front. I was then able to line up my sentiment and remove the stenciled piece and stamp the sentiment in the correct spot. Once the sentiment was stamped,I could adhere the stenciled piece and Ice Cream.

CARD 2 – Love/Thinking of You

For my second, card I used some blue metallic card stock and gold glitter card stock to try to keep to my color scheme and add some sparkle. You can see that the blue cardstock is metallic in the photo below. I used the Moroccan cover die with the gold glitter cardstock for a fancy background. The alphabet die cut set I used is called Flat & Fold Alpha Die.

If the letter is symmetrical, like O, V, E, the die cut cuts half of the letter and puts a fold line so you can fold the letter down or across to form the letter. See photo above. I cut the word/letters out of coordinating blue card stock, then on the back side I inked the letters with Versimark ink and heat embossed them in gold before folding them over to the front side. I also gold embossed the word “you” under the word “love.”

CARD 3 – Happy Anniversary



My next card was the Happy Anniversary Card. For this card I used the Stripe Builder Stencil. In order to get the perfect rectangle in the middle, I made a rectangular mask out of acetate. I used Pixie Spray temporary adhesive to hold my rectangular mask in place, then put the Stripe Builder Stencil over that.

After I colored the background, I added my sentiment and added some of the pieces that were cut from the Moroccan cover die from my last card into a star shape. I then mounted it on some of the same gold glitter paper and mounted that on the same metallic blue paper that matched my color scheme.

CARD 4 – Encouragement

My last card was the most fun for me to make. I took my inspiration from a painting of mountains. I was sure I could reproduce the look using embossing paste and die ink.

First thing I did was practice on some scrap paper to see if I could make this work. I took some Altenew white embossing paste and put it on my craft mat and used some Winter Lake die ink to color it. As you can see from my first photo I was able to get some texture. So when I was sure I could do this, I then taped down my Mountain Scene Stencil to heavy weight white card stock. I then got out more paste and mixed it with the Winter Lake die ink, but I was careful not too make the color too uniform. I wanted to make sure I would get lighter and darker shades. However, the first side I did was the darker side so I had to make sure it was dark enough. I did not want my mountains smooth, so once the paste was filled into the stencil I used a pouncing motion with my palette knife to give the paste some texture for the rugged landscape look. I let that dry then, mixed up more paste with the less of same color so that it would be lighter. Again I pounced my palette knife on the wet paste to give a rough or rugged look.

Once that was dry, I used a blending brush with Icy Water ink to ink up the water and Polar Bear ink to give the sky a little color. Next, I mixed the paste with Sea Forest ink and put it over the tree part of the stencil. Then I added some dark green ink to the mix and pounced my palette knife horizontally across the trees to simulate branches. Once the paste was dried, I trimmed the cardstock down to 5×3 inches and adhered it to the same metallic blue paper leaving a 1/4 inch border around the edge. I wanted a white border at the bottom of the card for the sentiment, which I inked in Mangrove Root die ink.

Thanks for visiting and I hope I’ve given you some inspiration.

2 Comments

  1. Erum Tasneem

    August 18, 2021 at 8:19 pm

    All your cards are amazing but that last card is breathtakingly gorgeous!!! You have done a fine job on that one and it needs to be framed!
    Thank you for submitting your wonderful work to the AECP assignment gallery.

    1. Laurie Patterson

      August 19, 2021 at 11:40 am

      Thanks so much. I had fun doing these.

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