Home Sweet Home | Monochromatic Design

Do you ever have an idea, sit down to make it, and then it just turns out kinda… bleh? I thought this card would be easy, but the colours I originally chose for it just didn’t work. I was planning to go white(ish) on white, with ivory embossing on the panels. I got all the pieces stamped and heat embossed, and laid them into position on the card. And it was awful. I told my husband to have a look, and well… he made an uncomplimentary noise, then called it “unusual”, which just reinforced my thoughts on it. So I changed my plan!

First I cut down all my panel pieces. I went with 1⅝” square for the four back pieces, and 2⅛” for the large focal square. All of them are cut from snippets. Honestly, you could do 1½” and 2″ for them, I am not sure why I decided to add that extra eighth. (Side note: isn’t eighth a funny looking word?)

For the four smaller pieces I wanted them stamped with a scripty design. I only have one scripty stamp and it’s in a set I don’t really like or particularly use, so I had to dig it out of my “to be destashed” drawer to make this project! I used Soft Granite ink from Hero Arts’ Shades of Grey ink cube set for stamping these. The stamp I was using was big enough that I could stamp two at a time in my MISTI, and I made sure to position each pair slightly differently so that none of them would be identical.

Next I placed the larger square into my MISTI to create the focal panel. I wanted to add the row of houses from Love From Lizi’s Home Sweet Home stamp set. I had to hunt for that stamp set too… Normally I put kit stamps into my normal stamp storage, but for some reason that set was still in with the kit! I considered masking and stamping just one of the buildings but I decided I’d rather fill out the panel a bit more. I again used the Soft Granite ink for this.

The final bit of stamping was adding the sentiment, which is also from Home Sweet Home. I wanted it to stand out more, so I went to the next shade of ink in the Shades of Grey set, which was Chalkboard.

Having completed all the stamping I move on to work on my layout. I decided to add a large snippet of grey as a background panel. I thought at first it was exactly the right size, but later ended up trimming it because the dimensions were very slightly off. Laying all of the panels into place I decided I needed to add matting to them. I searched through the card I had nearby and found another large snippet of grey, this time a slightly darker grey that is pearlised. I trimmed mats to be ⅛” larger than each of the panels, then adhered all of the panels onto them with double sided tape.

Finalising the arrangement on the card took way longer than was necessary! I laid all the pieces into place, using my T-Square ruler to line them up and try to get the spacing and positioning even. I then used washi tape to hold the pieces together whilst I adhered each of the panels together. I used liquid glue at this stage so that I could have a little wiggle room.

Once all the pieces were adhered together into a higgledy-piggledy column I wanted to add some stabilising pieces to the back. As the pieces all overlap the focal panel is two levels higher than the top and bottom panel, which are one level lower than the inner two panels. If that makes sense! I used odds and ends of leftover snippets from the pearlised grey card to add the necessary depth behind each of the panels. Once it was all leveled out I was able to adhere the column onto my grey background panel. I then snipped away the overhanging pieces of my top and bottom squares, and finally adhered the whole thing onto my white card base.

I am so much happier with this second attempt at the design! It’s not a show-stopping, mind-blowing design by any means, but I think it works. And it can be customised to different colours palettes as well. I think the layout is really fun, too. I’d love to know what you think of it.

Love,

Charlotte E (Lady Joyful) Email thejoyfulsoulcreates@gmail.com

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Challenges:

Fun Friday Challenge – Home Sweet Home

Just Us Girls – Script

Tuesday Morning Sketches – Sketch