Making the Most of Patterned Papers

I thought I'd share a trick for mixing patterned papers with stamped and coloured images today as I know lots of people struggle with how to use their papers on a card.  There are a couple of tricks I use when working with papers - firstly I try to take the colours I use to colour my image from the paper I selected to use, and then I add a "barrier"  piece of plain card to mount my image on to give it space and make it pop.   I've done a couple of examples here using the same image in two different colour ways so you can see what I mean.

I actually made these cards for members of DT who had birthdays this week but they should have opened them by now so I can share them.   I wanted to use Enda With A Cupcake On Top as I love the oversized cupcake (and she has a big bum just like me!) so I selected two different papers from the new Party Time paper pad from Echo Park and set out to colour them.  It's probably not a surprise that I went for the teal paper, so for my second card I forced myself to pick colours out of my comfort zone - the balloons give you lots of scope for picking colours for the image.

Once the images were coloured and cut out out I chose a circle die and cut circles from white and black card stock - this is my "barrier piece".  If you put your image directly onto the patterned paper it would be lost but by mounting her onto a contrasting plain paper first you give the image space to breathe. 

The paper pad has a couple of papers in it that have happy birthday written on them so I decided to use those for my sentiment with another trick I like to use with patterned paper - cutting it into strips of different thickness.  This adds more interest than a thick single strip as you still get some of the base colour mixed in.

Hope those are useful tips are you have a go at using papers on your projects.

NEWS FROM THE STORE:

• We received a big restock order from MFT yesterday which will be live in store later today or tomorrow.
• We currently have deliveries pending from Concord & 9th, SugarPea Designs and a massive restock order from Lawn Fawn but they are stuck in customs clearance hell at the moment.  I am working to clear them and hope we can get them released within a couple of days.
• We have another two massive restock orders from Altenew in transit - hopefully that will be here by the end of the week (customs willing).  Not all the oos items will be in this order as some items are still oos at their end.  We order every couple of weeks at the moment so we will get everything back as as soon as we can but their stock flies out so fast we are unlikely to ever have "everything" in stock at the same time.  Sorry, but there is nothing we can do about that - the best advice is "grab it while you can"
• We have an order in with Neat and Tangled for a new release and restocks which should ship this week.
• We have an order in for the stunning new release from Stamping Bella and are just waiting for it to ship.