Using Layering Stencils to Create Cards for Dads

Alison Day
Alison Day

This month the Design Team is putting the focus on the men in our lives. I fully admit to struggling with this one, mostly because, with three daughters, my one man gets a bit forgotten! I LOVE to embrace all the pink, glitter, butterflies and florals when scrapbooking about my girls (and myself) but when it comes to telling stories or making cards for my husband … I stumble. Thanks to Nikki’s post I feel armed to approach my layouts about him in a different way, so thank you Nikki!

Now that I own a Craft Store and am on the hunt for crafting supplies to appeal to more than just my own personal taste, I can safely say I have plenty of products to create both layouts and cards for anyone of the male persuasion. And since we host regular Drop In nights at the store, I get time to play with those supplies. Last night I pulled out a couple layering stencils and my Distress Oxide inks and let my creativity flow. 

First up is this one from Honey Bee Stamps called In Gear. I’ve been wanting to play with this stencil for awhile and love how this card turned out … now. But it took a bit to get there. My first attempt was to use Salty Ocean on the gears and Blueprint Sketch for the solid centres. It was … meh. So I tried again. This time I blended Tumbled Glass over the background, then used Salty Ocean for the gears with Shabby Shutters for the solid centres. Much better! I was getting an ameoba/Coronavirus vibe rather than gears, so I went looking for a solution. Finding the soccer ball stamp to fill in a few of the larger gears was it. Then I created the sentiment panel and added it with dimensional adhesive. 

My husband is not a gear-head, or a tool-head, or BBQ King, or any of the traditional images and sentiments you’d normally find on a Father’s Day stamp set. He loves sports, can do my taxes, and takes great pleasure in ferrying our girls to various practices and/or games. But that’s a little hard to quantify in a card! This one comes close though. 

Next I thought I’d try a 3-layer stencil. I had fun with two layers so why not add another? This Bokeh Star one is from Taylored Expressions and was a bit trickier to work with. With the gear stencil it was easy to see how the images lined up on top of each other. This one the images are purposefully overlapping in an off-set manner so I had to take a step back and figure out to line the stencils up properly. 

See those little squares cut on on the sides of the stencils? They line up, so when you place the first stencil, either use a pencil to mark off those squares onto your background paper or (if you’re like me and are just using a pre-cut card panel) stencil through them onto your craft mat. Either way, you can then use those inked squares to line up the next two layers. 

For the above card I used Speckled Egg, Stormy Sky, and Scattered Straw Distress Oxide inks. I love the soft palette. I feel like this stencil (and colour combo) would be equally good for a new baby card, a Grad card, or even a birthday card. Can’t wait to make more to sell in our store!

The last card I made last night was this one. I love this background stamp from Catherine Pooler! It could be a coffee spill, a paint spill, or an oil spill (if you actually DO have a gear-head dad in your life – how cool would this be in iridescent paint or embossing powder?) I used Gathered Twigs to give it a coffee stain look and emphasized the distressed style by tearing the edges of my sentiment block paper. It’s a lot simpler than most of my cards, but that is my tendency for the masculine cards I make. I just don’t think guys are interested in a whole lot of glitter and “stuff” on their cards!

Before I go I wanted to share that I have one other “man” in my life these days – my 2 year old lab, Scout. He’s started to show up in my scrapbook layouts and I’ve been bringing in pet themed lines to help (like this new one from PhotoPlay Paper – so cute!) And if you are looking for an excellent line to scrapbook boys, husbands, and pets, check out the No Limits collection from Cocoa Vanilla. 

When it arrived in my store, my gut reaction was “this is going to be great to scrapbook boys!” There are a lot of products with bright cheery rainbows, cute clouds, pretty flowers and colourful butterflies. Don’t get me wrong, I love them all! But finding more than a sheet or two in each collection that can “safely” be used to tell stories about the boys is hard. And I know, there’s no reason you can’t use flowers and butterflies on your layouts about your sons and your husbands (giant shout out to Shimelle for using ALL THE THINGS on her layouts about her son!) But for me, if I’m telling a story about my husband, I’m not inclined to use pink or flowers. So this one is awesome.

And the first man in my life that I used this collection to scrapbook about is … my dog. Poor husband gets knocked down another peg in the hierarchy of scrapbooking – LOL! I created this layout during LOAD522 using one of Alice Boll’s layouts as inspiration. It is mostly the No Limits collection, with some of the new Sweet Rush collection from Vicki Boutin thrown in for good measure. 

Well I hope that helps give you some ideas on how to scrapbook your guys, and make cards for them too. Thank you for visiting today. Be sure to check out Nikki’s post from last week for more masculine inspiration, and Misty’s post on her favourite small crafty businesses. I’ve tried to feature smaller companies in today’s post too. Being a “little guy” myself it’s become exponentially important to me to support other small businesses – both locally and internationally. Big box stores and giant conglomerates are doing just fine in this economy. It’s the little guys that are working so hard to provide specialized products or services, and build community as they go. All hail the little guys!

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