Another level up! {Mo’s Dream Team}

Another Wednesday, another Mo Manning creation and another Elin special – clean and simple with cluster. I make a lot of these cards, but they’re fun and easy, what’s better than that? I love playing around with different elements to make my clusters, and today, I didn’t even use a single piece of foam tape for dimension, the chipboard pieces do all the work for me.

I decided that Evan with iPad was the perfect image for a birthday card for my nephew, who loves to play games on his iPad and Playstation. His favorite color has always been orange, so I used orange on my image, orange scraps of patterned paper, Orange Zest cardstock from Papertrey Ink and gears from Snip Art that I colored with an orange Copic marker.

I don’t really know how I ever survived without the stitched rectangles sets from My Favorite Things. I use the largest in the 2 set for pretty much every card I make. It creates a nice 1/16″ border around my panel, which, to me, is the perfect width. I used another MFT die for the sentiment banner. It’s from the Fishtail Flag Frames set, another set I use a great deal. MFT has some very versatile dies! For the actual sentiment (which is a digital sentiment that comes with the image) to be the right color I put a scrap piece of the orange cardstock into my scanner, opened the scanned image in Photoshop, used the eyedropper tool to choose that color, and changed the color of the sentiment before printing.

I’ve set myself a challenge to see how far I can get this year by only using scraps of patterned paper and not digging into new ones. Design team contributions for Hobbykunst get to be exempt from my little experiment, but I think I can make it pretty far with just scraps. It helps that I tend to make cards like this, that don’t require big chunks of patterned paper. The orange one with the dots is from a pack of digital patterned papers by Cathy Zielske that I bought years ago, and the other one is actually from a Halloween collection from Papirdesign. I diecut them both with a die from Xcut that diecuts lots of tickets from one die. I put a chipboard piece from Snip Art on top of my tickets, and a sentiment banner straight on top of that. By using the chipboard, I get dimension without having to resort to foam tape, which is always a plus.

I felt like I needed a little bit towards the bottom, too, so I added another small ticket, another uncolored piece of Snip Art chipboard and half a colored gear, as well as a blue enamel dot from Papirdesign. It’s amazing how much you can fit into such a small space if you just stack it.