Category: How to

Having thought about what might appeal to young girls to make up as cards, I settled on a rainbow with pink tones, a card with an embossed background together with a simple coloured image, and the most appealing thing of all – sweets! What kid can say no to candy? In fact, there was MUCH debate during the class about who they’d give their cards to, but they were unanimous in the intention of sending the candy treats to themselves!

Basic skills covered in class were die cutting, stencilling with glitter paste, stamping with both black and coloured inks, watercolour painting die cuts, copic colouring a simple image and a die cut, and embossing a card panel. Sounds like a lot doesn’t it? You are right.

Here’s a photo of what was contained in their kits. The larger pieces include two Neenah Classic Crest Solar White #110 card bases, two card fronts in Bazzill Icy Mint (one was trimmed down to 5 3/8 x 4 1/8″, the other was a standard 5 1/2 x 4 1/4″), a Bazzill Sour Lemon piece large enough for The Greetery candy top, a white candy bottom including the ripper circle and a Lawn Fawn stitched cloud edge panel.

There is enough space at my table for four participants. I ended up with four paying participants, so Amélie had to step aside and become an official helper on the day (which she happily did). She is just 7, and a very keen cardmaker, so we did a special session the night before where she created the cards for herself, and therefore knew how to help on the day.

Actually it was great we did that, because based on that session, there was a step in the process I decided to skip entirely (heat embossing – thought I’d save that for another day), and I realised if some of the more fiddly glueing was done, that would save A LOT of frustration (and glue I imagined) at the end, without taking away from their learning. (I like to stack die cuts on my cards, so pre-glueing a few components definitely saved some time).

Each girl had a wee tray with their kit (I use these little square trays in my adult classes too and they are invaluable for keeping small pieces contained and saves mixing kit bits up with their neighbours.

They also had a little plastic paint palette with a dab of each of the four colours of Nuvo Shimmer powders, a cup of water and a paintbrush.

I also had a box of selected Copic markers and a pack of baby wipes in the centre of the table – we certainly went through those!

I placed stamps into various stamp platforms lined up on my cabinets ready for them to stamp. I felt that using acrylic blocks would result in mistakes and frustration for young beginners (for adults I always get them to stamp with an acrylic block first before introducing them to a stamp platform).

I had pairs of stamps set up for the Happy Birthday on the rainbow card, the sentiment and stars for the candy pop, and decorative stamps for the Rainbow pieces. We ended up not stamping the rainbow decorations in the end, mainly because the girls painted their rainbows in various colours rather than simply copying mine (which was awesome, but didn’t match my stamping ink! ).

For the Rainbow Card, I thought the girls would really enjoy stencilling with glitter paste (like, who wouldn’t??). I pre-taped the stencil with painter’s tape, so all they had to do was line it up over their light blue piece of cardstock, press it down onto their mat and gave them the spatula. They really did quite well, and I simply swiped up the excess paste with the Stencil pal, giving them the smooth final finish and returning excess paste to the jar. They lifted the stencil and passed it on to their neighbour. I actually had two very similar MFT stencils, so this process went reasonably quickly. Stencils and spatulas were dumped into the kitchen sink for clean up.

After they had fun stencilling and painting and all those pieces were set aside to dry, we moved on to adding colour with markers. I chose a simple image and a pair of light and dark copic pens for them to learn to add a little basic shading. Narwhals of various colours emerged here too.

I had pre-glued the fiddly Happy Birthday circles together to create a stacked element. They just had to add colour to the letters in whatever palette/pattern they wanted – some very pretty pastel rainbows came out!

They had a yellow piece of cardstock in their kits, and they die cut the top half of the candy piece – I had the two dies taped together to cut the main shape and the circle window at the same time.

They then stamped the sentiment with black ink, and some stars with Delicata silver shimmer ink with stamps already set up in the two stamp platforms.

They also stamped the Happy and Birthday onto the cloud panel for the rainbow card set up in the other two platforms. (Be prepared for a bit of a clean up of stamps later!)

The main rush of ‘doing’ was over, we had pretty much completed all major components and they were able to settle in and glue things together. All of the above had taken around an hour and fifteen minutes, so I was feeling pretty confident that we were going to complete everything within the 2 hour window I was aiming for – despite various visits from my two nosey dogs distracting the girls who wanted to cuddle them desperately! Motivation was retained by reminding them about the Skittles Smoothies I had to fill their candy bubbles!

I didn’t really need to have much input apart from encouragement after that – they happily referred to the photograph of the cards and candy pop on my TV screen so they could all see what the finished product should look like. In the end, all their projects were almost exact replicas apart from some small colour choices of their own that they had made at the start.

We were all done comfortably within the allotted 2 hour time slot, and the girls went home with their finished projects – still talking about who’s birthday was next coming up and when they’d eat the treats!