AAA Cards DT: One Inchie

At the end of the summer, I was delighted to be invited to join the AAA Cards design team. AAA Cards is another clean and simple card challenge blog with a twice-monthly theme. All entries have a chance to win a ‘guest designer’ spot in a future challenge.

As a newbie DT member, I will start officially in January but feature in this week’s challenge as an introductory offer. The theme is ‘one inchie’ with the optional twist of making a card suitable for a man/boy. For those not in the know, an inchie is a piece of work that is either 1″ square or diameter. An added challenge is the requirement that all the artwork, sentiment, and matting must be within the prescribed one inch. There is an option for the inchie to be an aperture as a window to artwork inside.

An inch is not a lot of space and few, if any, of my stamps/die cuts/sentiments would fit. So, I thought laterally and rummaged through my stash until I found my shrink plastic. If the stamp is too big, shrink it!

I stamped on the shrink plastic using StazOn ink taking care not to slide the stamp across the slick surface. Blast the shrink plastic with the heat tool and flatten whilst hot with the back of a wooden stamp block or any other heat resistant smooth, flat, surface. I find that shrink plastic rarely shrinks squarely, hence the imperfect shape on my card. Matted onto white watercolour paper and then onto black, all within the one-inch square. Mounted on a 5×5″ card.

I tried a colour version, using Ecoline water-based ink brush pens. If used prior to shrinking, the colour intensifies once shrunk. If used after, it remains as a watercolour wash. I didn’t like either effect, so went with the black and white version.