Simply Cards & Papercraft 132

Well, I'm still in the process of catching up on sharing my published work with you - issue 33 has hit the shelves (and I have some cards featured inside! More on that at a later date), so I'm now only an issue behind.

I made these projects way back last year and was asked to create masculine birthday cards using a colourful corrugated mat stack by DCWV. This mat stack has seen a lot of use since, especially the natural brown colour, it's amazing how much use I get from it! The recycled/kraft look fits my style pretty well, and I love the texture it gives to a project.

I added a distressed effect to the mat in the card above by tearing around the top-left and bottom-right edges, then used white acrylic paint and a mask to dry-brush the polka dot pattern across the card front (yes, back in my dry-brushing days!).

For this card, I also used the dry-brushing technique to highlight the star hand-cut from red corrugated card. I kept the design fairly simple as masculine cards tend not to be too fussy, but a die-cut border and some extra cream polka dots finished it off.

Stars are always great for masculine cards, but you also can't go wrong with circles! I decided to use the mat stack to create some textured circles, which I layered up along with stickers, enamel dots and paper circles. This type of material isn't something you can die-cut particularly well, but I managed to use my scalloped circle punch for the blue circle, and of course using templates to hand-cut your own shapes from this thick material is always a must.

As always, I haven't shown all the cards featured in the magazine, so make sure you grab a copy to see the rest of my designs! That's it for now, back soon :)