You're Retro birthday card

Hello crafters. How are you all? I’m thrilled to be part of the Kate Hadfield Designs Team. I’m going to share with you my first project. Eeekk!!

I loooove anything ‘Retro’. I actually believe I was born into the wrong era! Hehe! I have a record player just like this myself but it’s currently gathering dust. I need to give it pride of place in my home somewhere.

I was giddy when I saw this set of Kate’s. There are soooo many fun elements in this kit. It is available as a Digital Stamp and Pre coloured imagery for your ease.

Let me talk you through what I did with the Digi Stamps….

I started by printing my image off onto 250gsm white Super Smooth Card, having scaled it suitable for my A6 card blank. I typically use a UK A6 top fold for my cards.

TOP TIP: Super Smooth card is essential when coming to use alcohol markers. It allows for the ink to move more freely, thus leading to a smoother blend.

I carefully fussy cut this down leaving a small border of less than 1mm. I then went in with my Copic markers: Record Player case BG11/BG53/BG15, Lid E23/E31/E39, Record N10/N8/N6/N4, Pin C5/C3/C8, Base E55/E43 and Record Label RV23/RV14.

TOP TIP: You’ll notice the white card in the background. When I’m working with a pre cut image, I like to temporarily stick it down to a larger piece of card using temporary tape glue. It means I can turn it around with ease to colour, without fingers getting in the way and risking finger prints.

I then went in and added some highlights using my white gel pen. There’s no hard and fast rule when adding highlight. I ‘try’ to add it to the lightest part of my colour. However, there are no rules in card making and where ever you can put it, works! No one is going to judge whether it is in the correct place.

I cut down a piece of White Super Smooth 250gsm card to approx 4-5mm smaller round each edge than my card blank. Taking my Vintage Photo Distress Oxide, I gently inked the edges of my card panel, going in heavier around the outside edge. I went ahead and stuck this down to my card blank using wet adhesive (for extra wiggle time!)

Next, I printed out ‘retro’ and ‘vintage’, again on Super Smooth 250gsm card. I also typed and printed in what I considered a complimentary font, the words ‘You’re not’ and again ‘you’re’. These latter words were simply trimmed down using scissors.

The ‘retro’ and ‘vintage’ I coloured using the same colours and tones as the record player, ie, RV23 and RV14 (pink) and just BG53 (Teal). I then fussy cut these. I also added some highlight to these, as per before.

With the manually typed words, I also distressed the edges with Vintage Photo Distress Oxide so that they weren’t too bright white again the card once all pieced together.

I now started to put everything together. I laid all my elements out on my card face to confirm composition and that they’d all fit. But, at this stage, I wasn’t happy with the plain white background. I decided to ‘splat’ some black watercolour over the card face. However, I’d already stuck my panel down and didn’t want any ink beyond this. So, I cut a ‘frame’ from some basic printer paper, the approximate size of the panel, to protect areas I didn’t wanted ink and allowing ink just in the designated window.