Hello, hello, hello!

I just played with some washi tape with a difference - 'Rainbow Splatters' by Pink Fresh Studio. My order containing this recently came from Katrina of Bumbleberry Papercrafts, who deserves a shout out here. Her prices are very good, service is great and she stocks a lot of USA craft goodies as well - including A2 sized envelopes. I know some of you already buy from Katrina - and I truly recommend that you hop over for a little browse. And of course, both Seven Hills Crafts and Dies to Die For are great favourites of mine too. 

Back to the washi tape, it's the widest one I've ever had at 5.5" wide and 11 yards long. What's really clever about it is that it comes with a 'grid lines' dividing bit in the pattern at every 4.25" as you unroll it, so it's perfect for an A2 (USA) card front. Plus - the way it's designed is that you get three distinctively different 'rainbows' - divided by the  grid lines. I totally LOVE it! Hope that's a bit clearer than mud!

I made three cards, hence the 'Hello, hello, hello', in a little production line, the other day:

I used:

- 5.5" x 4.25" white card blank, side opening

- piece of white card trimmed to 5.75" x 4.25"

- one panel of the Pink Fresh Studio 'Rainbow Splatters' washi tape. As the tape is so wide, I didn't chop a whole panel off in one go - knowing my luck, it would curl back on itself. So this is what I did: unroll a little - just an inch is enough - place the long edge of your piece of card along the end of the unrolled piece of washi , flip it over so the piece of card lays flat on your work space, glass mat preferably, and gently unroll the tape from the roll onto your piece of card, constantly smoothing it as you go. It's a bit of a tough one to get going but once you have the knack and ignore You Tube videos where they pull off a whole panel at once, then you're good to go. Any creases will smooth out using a bone folder or the palm of your hand

- then I trimmed the panel to 5.25" x 4.00" and glued it to the card front using Collall All Purpose glue

- die cut the word 'hello' from a snippet of muted gold card, using my Altenew mini die cutting machine a die from the MFT Die-namics 'Hello There' set (it also come with the words 'hi' and 'there') - then twice twice from snippets of white card

- stacked the three layers of the 'hello' together, with the gold on top, using a Zig glue pen

- glued the word 'hello' onto the bottom right corner of the card - done

The three cards were super fast to make and I love that they're quite different, despite being the same layout. 

So hard to take photos with the current sunshine, even with curtains closed, the colours on all three cards are much brighter in real life.

The 'splatters' are advertised as 'gold' and I admit that I did expect a brighter and possibly shiny gold. The little splatters do catch the light briefly if you wave the cards about. I don't have much more of that lovely muted gold card stock left - literally just a few snippets, but plain white would also work well for the sentiment, or even black. 

I was tempted to risk using my Cuttlebug as my shoulder seems to be on the mend, but resisted and stuck to the Altenew Moni machine. Otherwise, I wanted to have a go at die cutting the panel using a 'rectangular' stitched die. Not too sure how the washi will react to being die cut with a load of little perforations. Probably OK and I did keep a little scrap of trimming to try it out when I feel surer of not knocking what progress I've already made.

A lovely friend just got herself an electric die cutting machine and am pea green with envy here! I need to knuckle down and clear a couple of book shelves then move stuff around a bit to set up a dedicated cutting area. I don't need a big machine and will keep the Cuttlebug as a fall back - so far the Gemini Junior seems to tick all the boxes for my fairly unambitious needs.

I'm entering this into Darnell's NBUS Challenge #27 for June 2021 - HERE.

And, with Em's encouragement, I'm also entering into The Rainbow Card Challenge#30 - where the challenge theme is 'Radically Rainbow'. I have no idea how I haven't come across this challenge before now - it looks like fun with a new colour each month and two Radically Rainbow themes per year.

No idea what's going on with the Snippets Playground, numbers have plummeted lately. I bet everyone's been out enjoying the sunshine whilst it lasts!