Kits! Featuring Papier Tole

In my post yesterday I mentioned that I had been "under the weather." A sure sign of illness is no inclination whatever for crafting...so sad.
To get the creative juices flowing again, I took out one of my craft kits from the awesome company, Paper Wishes.  As well as selling popular items by other craft companies, they make their own line of 12x12 papers, Dazzles stickers, stamps, and unique to the crafting world, as far as I know, Papier Tole. They also produce weekly "Webisodes," showcasing trendy items, techniques and ideas to inspire you.

I mentioned craft kits: they offer a whole series of monthly or every-two-monthly kits with such themes as scrap-booking, card-making, jewelry-making, paper-crafting, girls-create, stencilling, etc. I receive their Papier Tole kit every other month, which usually contains materials for at least 4 projects.

This card is one of them. The papier tole is like those old Holly Hobby images where you cut and layered parts of the image for a 3-D shadow-box effect. However, no cutting required (its all die-cut) and the images range from soft and romantic to vintage to funky foil with amazing embossing to the intriguing pyramid images...you should really take a look HERE. The sheets are so reasonably priced, easy to use and produce great results.
I personalized this card for my dad's upcoming birthday. He and my mum are going to be travelling this summer, so that chevron image on the distressed map paper was perfect.

Here is a close-up of the layered image:

It is very easy to line up the layers, using foam-tape. They are easily squishable so you don't need to worry about extra postage, when sending them through the mail.

One of the more enjoyable parts of this project was distressing the map paper. It used to be white and boring, but I followed the directions, first chalking the piece with green ink, then crumpling it up, then flattening it and rubbing distress ink over the raised parts. I distressed and tore the edges a bit, here and there, too, to make it really antiqued and interesting.

I stamped the birthday wishes using "birthday2celebrate" from The Stamps of Life, and Staz-On ink because of the slick surface of the die-cut.

You can choose to follow the kit's suggested directions faithfully, or ad-lib to your heart's content.
On this card, I switched up the ribbon, added a corrugated star (reminded me of the old Texaco gas sign) and used some of the extra art-work on the sheet--vintage postage stamps, and a luggage label and destination sticker, for the inside of the card.

So, a birthday card taken care of, a new technique learned, and best of all, the creative juices jump-started! What's not to love about kits?