Sending You Rainbows with Carson Riutta

Hello, everyone! I’m happy to be here sharing a fairly quick and easy card with you today. I was overthinking things this month and felt like I needed to share a technique-heavy project, but I was having trouble finding the energy to put something like that together. Then it dawned on me that you all are probably just as busy and stretched as I am, and might appreciate a card tutorial that isn’t so time-intensive. So here is a card that you can use for many occasions, for pretty much anyone and it only takes a few minutes to put together.

First, gather your supplies. I used both the unicorn stamp and cloud stamp + die from the Jolly Holiday release. You’ll need three colored inks, your favorite black ink, one piece of patterned paper, some white cardstock and your die-cut machine. Feel free to choose whichever colors and patterns make you happy. 

Begin by stamping out some rainbows using the unicorn stamp set. Make sure the rainbows are spread out, and leave room for the addition of your clouds. I found four to be a good number for an A2 card front. Also, don’t worry about stamping the rainbows perfectly. Once the clouds are added to the cards, any inconsistent rainbow stamping will not be pronounced, and a wonky rainbow or two will actually add to the charm of the card.

Next, you'll want to cut your clouds from your chosen papers. I wanted to keep the color palette very traditional and bright, so I went with white and baby blue papers, but of course you could mix things up to suit your personal tastes. I cut five clouds from each paper and ended up not using all of them - but nothing annoys me more than having to continue going back and forth from my desk to my die-cut station, so I try whenever possible to cut all my shapes at once.

Now you want to lay your clouds out across your card front. I started with the blue clouds, as I knew they would be in the background layer. Just make sure that your clouds look somewhat random across the page, nothing too linear here.

Then go ahead and layer your white clouds on top. You’ll notice that the white clouds don’t pop off the white background, so I decided to go in with a black marker and draw some stitch marks to help make the white clouds stand out. This is an easy technique that is difficult to get wrong, but there are other ways to make your clouds pop, too. You can use the cloud patterned stamps that come in the set, you could mat each cloud on a piece of black paper and fussy cut around it, or even just drag your marker along the outer edge of each cloud to give it some contrast.

Finally you want to add your sentiment. To make it stand apart from the rest of the clouds in the sky, I chose to stitch in red pen, add a stamped heart and use some dimensional adhesive to pop the cloud off the page.

There you have it - a quick and easy card for the next time you’re in a rush but still want that handmade touch. I hope you’ll give this little number a try.