Love You More Than Coffee – Mixed Media Coffee Stained Card

Hey there, here I am again with another AECP Class post!

Today I am posting a project for my fifth AECP Level 1 Class I have taken – For The Guys taught by Jennifer Rzasa.  I have a little confession as I kind of groaned when I saw the name of this class on my class list as it is not usually my favourite thing to do and I have mixed feelings about “cards for guys”.  Sometimes I struggle with them, sometimes I wonder why they have to have a separate category and sometimes I think “cards for guys are boring”. So instead of putting it off till the end, I decided to tackle this class last night and I could not believe how fun it was and how great the cards were.  There is also a guest “guy” participating in one of the lessons and that was a lot of fun too!  Anyway, let’s get on with the card.  Links to all my class posts are at the bottom of the post.

Inspiration

This class was all about making cards suitable for guys of all types.  I was not expecting to be inspired but I really was, and stayed up late to finish it, and took notes!  I couldn’t wait to get started this morning – the only problem was narrowing down which of the techniques to focus on as I really liked all of them.   Sadly I do not have any of the stamp sets featured in the lessons but I knew I could make something similar with what I had, and I liked the idea of a geometric interactive card so I decided to stick to those techniques.

Overview of my card process

I have a couple of stamp and die sets that could be considered geometric – including the trigonometry set – and I almost used that but in the end decided I would use the Layered Plaid Cover Die A rather than the B Cover Die as it has some nice open squares in the design and I wanted to use those squares.  I cut it from scrap white paper, and then covered it with Espresso ink.  I also had this piece of watercolour paper leftover from another experiment in tea and coffee staining, and wanted to use that to make a coffee lovers card, and thought the tea and coffee stains would look good against the Espresso-coloured Plaid die cut.

I used the Coffee Love stamp set to stamp out some different coffee pots, and then fussy cut them as I don’t have the matching dies.  Then I coloured them in using my Polychromos pencils. My idea was to have two coffee pots, one on each side of the card, facing each other with the sentiment in the middle.  So it was just a matter of finding the right coffee pots to fit in those spaces.  I stamped them with Versafine Clair Fallen Leaves ink which is a very dark brown and actually almost looks black in the stamping.  Then I stamped the LOVE YOU MORE THAN COFFEE sentiment with embossing ink and heat embossed it with gold embossing powder.  I used a Tim Holtz stacked label die to cut around the sentiment.

Meanwhile, I worked out what size I needed my card to be.  I found some Lawn Fawn brown cardstock in my stash that was actually called “Ground Coffee” would you believe? I folded it in half as I knew I wanted the card to be a top-opening card and so it needed to be 5.5 inches high and then I needed to work out the width, based on how much of the tea/coffee stained watercolour paper I wanted to show around the edges of the Plaid cover die.  I settled for a card size of 5.5 x 6.5 inches which gave me 0.25 inch borders around the layers. After cutting the watercolour background to size, I distress the edges and edged them with Distress Vintage Photo Archival ink.

I adhered the watercolour paper to the brown cardstock base, then adhered the Plaid die cut on top.  But there was one more thing to do before I could attach anything else…

Using some thin gauge jewellery wire and pliers, I made some short coils to work as springs, and then using my hot glue gun, I attached a spring to each of the coffee pots, and then glued the other end of the springs to the card base through the open squares in the Plaid die cut. Then the final step was to edge the sentiment with a gold metallic pen and glue the sentiment to the centre of the card.  Now the little coffee pots will wobble and my card for a coffee-loving guy is complete!

Thoughts

I really loved making this card and it all came together so quickly as I already had the idea worked out in my head.  I like the “coffee” colours of the card, all those browns, quite masculine, and I think they would love the interactive element of the wobbly coffee pots.

PROJECT RECIPE:

Altenew – Layered Plaid Cover Die A, Coffee Love stamp set, Espresso Ink,
Lawn Fawn – Ground Coffee cardstock
Faber-Castell – Polychromos pencils
Tim Holtz – Distress Archival – Vintage Photo, Stacked Label die
Versafine Clair – Fallen Leaves ink
Wow – embossing ink
Ranger – gold embossing powder
Nuvo – Deluxe Adhesive
Sakura – gold metallic pen
From stash/other: leftover tea/coffee-stained watercolour paper, jewellery wire, hot glue

FYI Here’s a list of the Classes for Level 1:

.All About Layering 1
.All About Layering 2
.Clean & Simple Boutique Cards
.Easy Ink Blending Techniques
.For The Guys You are here
.Let It Shine
.Celebration: Stencil Techniques
.Seasonal Scene Building
.Easy Die Cutting Techniques
.Irresistible Inking Techniques