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!}

Using Scraps: Introduction

Sooooo, I've been talking about doing this series on using scraps, and now here I am following through on that!  (Finally!)

Before I started thinking about using my scraps, I barely ever used them, and they were piling up around my desk everywhere.  Okay, I'll be honest, they still are, but not quite as much.  I still have two full bags of scraps, one of which is so full I can barely stick my hand in to get something out.   I hate to admit it, but I am a hoarder of scraps.  Ha, like you couldn't tell by now.

I was inspired to start using up my scraps when I started reading this awesome blog, more specifically these Use What You Have posts.  The name says it all, right?  They talk about how you don't have to buy anything from the store to be creative!  I love that, and it's helped me to think about how I can use all the supplies I have laying around.  Pretty helpful.  Below is a picture of my two overflowing bags of scraps.  I cherish my pride too much to show a picture of my desk though.

The one in front is not quite so full now, thankfully.  I'm not doing any tutorials on this post, but I am showing y'all some cards I've made using mostly or only scraps.  The cards themselves don't count.

In later posts in this series, I'll hopefully be sharing some simple tutorials on using scraps for cards!

Hope you enjoyed this post!

Fabric Flower Hair Clip

Woot!  I'm doing something different!  I'm sure y'all have gotten a little bored reading card tutorial after card tutorial.  Funny thing is, when I started making this flower, I thought I was making it for a card, but nooo, that didn't work out!  I'm quite glad though.  Truth be told, this will look like a card making tutorial until the hair clip comes in.  Hehe, I'm sorry.  I can't help it.

A few years ago, I had an out of state friend come over for a few days, and one of the things we did was make cards.  That is, we planned on making cards. I don't remember if she got any made, but I know I didn't.  Instead I paced around trying to think of a card idea, and finally I came up with the idea to fold a long piece of fabric in half and sew it together at the bottom, and make a rose out of it, and then use it on a card.  I folded the fabric and sewed it together at the bottom, but I wasn't quite sure exactly how to make it into a rose, even though I sort of knew in theory how I was going to do it.  So that long piece of fabric stayed on my chair or on my desk or really, it's probably been many places in the vicinity of my room.

I've been preparing to do a series on using scraps, which has encouraged me to use up some of my scraps.  So, on the spur of the moment, I decided to finally make that rose!  I always thought I would do it on some brown paper, or more likely, thin cardboard, which is sort of brownish.  But I also had this large piece of teal paper lying around (it had only been lying around for less than a week, but still), and it seemed to match the fabric, so I decided to go ahead and use it!

I may not have explained very well when I said I sewed it at the bottom.  Maybe this picture helps?  If it doesn't examine below peektor. 

You can see that the piece of fabric is duper long.  It's probably around 18 inches, but I can't be sure.  I should've measured it before I glued it on.  Which is what I'm doing in this picture.  Or what I did already.  In this picture.

I did not mention it above, but you should use hot glue to adhere the fabric.  It dries much quicker than any other kind of glue, and it will hold it better.

It's really important to have a toothpick to press down the fabric, because you can't do it with your fingers because of the hot glue.  Continue twisting the fabric around while gluing down until you get to the end.

Here it looks like a rose.  Like it's suppose to.

But here...it looks like a cake.  That is not what we're going for.

At this point I didn't know exactly what I was going to do about the cake-lookage, but I decided to cut out the flower anyway.  I used my super fancy super sharp scissors so that I could cut through the glue.

I ended up cutting the top off, so it was shorter and not so cake-like.

I ironed the part that I cut off, so it didn't have the fold in the middle.

...And then made folds and glued on to the edge.  I made sure to glue it on so it sort of went out sideways instead of straight up.  I wouldn't have been able to do that if I hadn't cut it out.  I don't know if it was because of the ironing, or just the kind of fabric, but it stayed when I put creases in with my fingers.

There, that's pretty.

Ah, it looks so much better on the side.

Hot glue a hair clip onto the back.

Look what I done made!