Inlaid Persian Motifs

My seventh submission to the Altenew Educator Certification Program is from Easy Die Cutting Techniques taught by Yana Smakula. She had some wonderful ideas for getting the most out of your dies and using them in new and creative ways. My choice for this card was the inlaid technique. I liked the flat yet dynamic look to it, almost like an enamel pin.

I love the look of mica-infused water colors on black paper and thought it would look really chic with inlaid die cutting, especially with a gold background. I chose Altenew’s Persian Motifs stamp and die set, as I could just envision all the separate petals with alternating colors in them.

I stamped several flowers on Stonehenge Aqua cold press black watercolor paper with Versamark ink, then heat embossed with Simon Says Stamp gold detail embossing powder. I then painted the flowers with some mica-infused watercolors. I really had fun with this part, although some of my color combinations didn’t turn out as good on paper, as they did in my head! 🙂 Thankfully I had stamped and embossed as many flowers as I could fit on the paper, so I had lots to play with! When dry, they were die cut.

Now began the process of…well, how am I going to do this? I didn’t want to mess up my pretty gold cardstock, so I decided to use some scrap printer paper to experiment with different layouts of the negative areas. Plus it helped knowing how all the pieces would go back together again. Once I had the layout I liked the best, I die cut the areas where the flowers will go from the metallic gold cardstock.

I knew I wanted a black trim around the whole piece, so I decided to glue the die-cut gold cardstock to a piece of black cardstock cut the same size. This way I could easily glue my flowers down and trim them flush with the gold cardstock.

The saying is from Altenew’s Penned Rose set, and was stamped then embossed with Simon Says Stamp black detail embossing powder on a scrap piece of the gold cardstock. It was placed on a black mat and adhered to the focal piece with foam tape. Then I cut it flush to the edge so that it would appear to be inlaid. I finished my card by gluing it to a black card base.

This is the first time I have tried this technique and I really enjoyed it! I’ve been searching through my stash to find other stamp and die sets that I want to try this with. 🙂

Thanks for stopping by and have a wonderful day!

Carol