How to Use a Doily to Create a Pair of Elegant Watercolor Cards

What a fun idea, right?  But wait, I haven't shown you what I'm talking about yet - all you know is that it involves a doily and watercolors, correct?  Well, you probably know a little more, because that picture up above is pretty self-explanatory.

When I saw this on Pinterest, I certainly did not need a whole blog post length tutorial!  Nevertheless, I shall provide you with one, because I'm going to show you how to use a doily in two ways, which means I will be showing you how to make two cards today!

Supplies
Doily
Watercolors
Watercolor paper
Watercolor brush
Water
Sharpie
Beads
Fabric flower
Hot glue
Cut out "thank you" (or other sentiment)(I used my die cut)

Card No. 1
First I cut out a piece of watercolor paper with about a half inch margin from the edges of the card.  Then I positioned a doily where I wanted it, sort of in the top left corner.

When watercoloring things like this, I always like to do use multiple colors that coordinate well together, so I used turquoise, light blue, and dark blue.  I started with turquoise, just dabbing the paint on with my brush, and using lots of water, and then I added the other colors, and went back and forth between the three until all the spaces (and the rest of the paper) were filled!  For now, you don't need to paint the center of the doily; we'll get to that later.

This picture shows the doily and paper after being painted.  Do not move the doily until you've finished painting!
See that big splotch at the bottom right of the circle?  I must have put too much paint in that spot, and it seeped through the doily.  But never fear; Brooklyn is here!  I can fix that with a fabric flower!

I have a box of fabric flowers and such things, and this yellow one I had is perfect for these cards.  This flower actually had six sections, so I used three for each card, and that worked well.  With a dark blue sharpie, I wrote "thank you" in the center of the doily-shaped empty space.

Here's one of my bags of beads, where I got the bead for the flower from.  That bead looks more black, but it has some blue in it, and I wanted kind of a dark bead for this card, to balance things out.

I thought the card needed something more, so I drew polka-dots over the whole card.

After that, I deemed it complete.  This is the final basic layout I came up with.  I decided to put the doily piece at an angle, since I thought it looked better that way, and I kind of wrote the sentiment crooked anyway.

I used hot glue for the flower, putting a little in between each section, and then a little on the underside to stick on the card.  Gluing everything on after I've figured out the layout is so satisfying!  Sometimes though, I think I've figured everything out, and then as I'm putting it together, I change something!  (I did not do that this time.)

Card No. 2
And now, we can paint the center of the doily!  These doilies are really neat, in that you can watercolor on them, and let it dry, and then come back later, and if there's a blossom, you can re-paint it.  There's some sort of coating.  It's not like watercolor paper, and it's not like regular paper (regular paper = copy paper).  So what I'm saying is, if you put too much paint in a section, or something, it's easy to spread it out with water.

I cut a piece of cardstock that measured 1/4 inch from each edge of the card, and outlined it in yellow sharpie, and did polka dots with the same sharpie, like I did for the other card.  I also used the other three sections of the flower.  Aaand (just one more thing!), I also used my "thank" and "you" die cuts for the sentiment, and I'm really happy with how it looks!

Since the sentiment for this card is white, not something dark, like the blue I used for the other card, I wanted to use a white bead for the center of the flower, so, from my bag of beads, I retrieved this nice, pearly white bead.  It works perfectly!  Now you can glue everything on, and that concludes both cards!

I really wanted to put the flower on the right side, like on the first card, but it just wouldn't look near as good with the tail of the "Y" hanging down like that.

What do you think of them?  I love how similar the two cards are, but at the same time, I love the differences between them.

I experimented with this back in March, but I just didn't get to posting about it until now!  This one is my favorite from back then.  Perhaps even my favorite doily card I've ever made!  (You can see more of these on my "Cards I've Made" page.)

Have you ever used a doily to create something?  What else could you make with a doily?

{P.S. Linking up here!}

Re-do of an Old Card

A {long-ish} while ago, I sent a card to a couple friends (sisters), and soon after, one of them asked me to do a blog post on it.  It took me too long, but finally, I got around to it!  I don't usually like to remake cards, so of course I had to change it a bit, a.k.a., improve it.  Below is a picture of the first version of this card.

First of all, I didn't have another huge pink flower I could use, so I had to figure out some other flower to put in the middle.  I happened to have these yellow fabric flowers in my closet that had been there for years.  At first I didn't know if they would work since they're so much smaller than the pink flower in the original card, but I got to figuring in my head, and decided to go with the yellow ones.  I mean, it's not like I'm gonna go out and buy something.  That would be silly.

There was no doubt in my mind that I wanted to use the same embossing folder as before.

I knew for sure that I did not want to have that band of paper around the middle.  But of course it still had to have some sort of band in the middle, so instead I used light pink sheer ribbon with black/white baker's twine wrapped around.

I wouldn't normally recommend using tape, but it was really the best option for this since glue wouldn't do the job very well.  So, after wrapping the ribbon around center, I taped both ends down.  I had to re-adjust the ribbon a bit to get it perfect.

After that was securely taped down, I carefully wrapped about 15 inches probably (I'm just guessing as I write this.  I didn't measure when I made the card.) of baker's twine twice around, and then tied a bow on the side.

I love the look of baker's twine over ribbon, don't you?

Here's one of the flowers that had been in my closet for so long.  I was actually quite happy to use it, despite my doubt at first.  I love to declutter!

I didn't want too much yellow, but still a little, so I separated the petals and only colored one.  At first I planned to color the whole thing with my light orange sharpie, so one of the petals is all orange, but after doing that first petal, I decided to do the ends light pink.  That way it goes with the pink ribbon.

I colored the ends with pink, then filled in the rest with orange.

This isn't a great picture, so it's hard to see how it actually looks.  It's not quite so bright in real life.

After all that was done, I had to put the flower center back in, of course.  To keep it all together, I blobbed super glue on the back.  The reason I didn't use regular liquid glue is because it had to be strong enough and fast drying.

Before the glue dried I stuck the flower there in the middle, and the only thing left was to adhere the  whole piece to the card!

In the original card, I dashed around the edge (yeah!  Sharpies can run duper fast too!  ...Okay...I know...lame joke...), but I didn't particularly like that look, and for this, I think it looks better with a blank edge.