For The Pea

One of my Tweeps goes by the name @BrownEyedPea, and one day she said she wished she had some personal stationery or note cards, and I offered to play to see if we could come up with something acceptable.

She actually found two stamps online that she liked and I used them for her creations. She even gave me permission to share the end result with the world, so here we go!

First are the note cards*:

I printed the sentiment on the computer in a color I thought was close to Mellow Moss, but turned out to be a little darker, which actually turned out to be a good thing. The pea pod is stamped in Artichoke Craft Ink and embossed with clear EP.

The stamped image and coloring breaks several stamping rules, and even though I thought there was a reason I should stop, ever the rebel, I waited until I was all done to check on it.

You see, I did several mock-ups, and in the end, she liked the embossed outline for the pea pod, and I liked the coloring with the Copics better than dye ink markers. As I colored more and more of them, I got a niggling feeling I was not supposed to mix alcohol markers and heat-embossed images. Did it stop me? No!

After I was all done, I sent out a plaintive plea to my Tweeps, asking if these cards would eventually disintegrate in the hands of the recipient. Apparently alcohol inks are supposed to dissolve embossing, but my crazy-good coloring skills (HAHAHA! not) did not seem to have caused that to happen, so I am safe. SAFE! Perhaps if I colored over the lines instead of between them it would have been ugly. Or maybe the alcohol markers are a different formulation than alcohol inks. Either way: Phew!

Here is a close-up of the pea pod:

You know what? I've just decided close-ups are a bad idea in my world. I can now see all the spots that are not perfectly colored. I intensely dislike seeing that. Hmph. ANYway, you can see the embossed lines and the two different colors of green I used (peas are YG63 and the pod is G85), and the outline (W-1). There is no science to my selection - I just liked those two greens together.

We also made some cards for Valentine's Day using the pea pod plus a sentiment:

The pea pod is colored here with YG63 (I went over the top of the pod with extra strokes to make it a little darker) and the hearts are R11. I stamped the sentiment in Artichoke.

And the obligatory close-up:

I think these came out pretty nice! It's a fun play on her Twitter name, don't you think?

I also had some fun with packaging. I am trying to improve in the packaging arena this year, and to that end I got a bunch of different sizes of clear boxes with my last shipment of the clear bags I use for my cards. This is what I did for each of the two sets of cards:

(Please look away from the glaringly-bad lighting in this photo.) I was very happy they all fit in the box size I'd selected. *wipes brow* These boxes are 1/2" deep, and just a bit larger than the open cards in length and width. I decided I wanted the boxes to hold the cards open (not folded), as it would be easier with larger quantities. Plus, I've had professionally-made stationery in the past, and all of them came not-yet-folded, so I figured there was probably a good reason for the practice.

I have all the cards laid out on top, the envelopes are split into two stacks under the cards, and they just fit in the box.

Let's try a side view:


The red line I made over there on the right denotes the stack of note cards. The blue lines show the two stacks of envelopes underneath the cards. It worked out fit-wise quite well.

So thanks, Pea, for the opportunity to make you something special and unique. And thanks for the dry run on my packaging. ;-) This was fun!

* The cards are all Very Vanilla Raised Edge Note Cards from SU, now sadly retired. I was fortunate enough to have hoarded them at the time, and I stocked up when they hit the retirement list. My collection is running dangerously low, and I'll be shopping for replacement cards very soon.

That's all I have for today. Thanks for stopping by!