Handmade by Natty

Good morning!

It’s a bit of a chilly and wet start to what is typically a warm and sunshiny month in these parts.

A time when the delights of summer can really get underway, with more time spent outside, the winter wardrobe being switched out for brighter summery patterns and colours, and those longer days can be enjoyed to the full.

Here’s this month’s prompt:

{Pintrest pin}

The focus colour for this month is: Neutral + bold tone

So basically, use white, cream, kraft, or grey as your anchor colour and add in a bold tone of your choice. The image above shows lots of shades that work well paired with neutrals.

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Minimalist – keep things clean and simple by featuring white on white elements with just a single pop of colour from an embellishment. For example, a white with little red/pink hearts coming out of it with a simple stamped sentiment below. Clean and simple all the way.
• Kite – feature a kit or elements associated with a kite, such as bows, strung items like bunting, twine, a diamond shaped mat or aperture, a pattern made up of diamonds/triangles in alternating colours.
• Vintage/modern technology – a camera, record player, typewriter, TV, phone, Instagram style frame, text message style abbreviated sentiments.
• Sunburst – the sunburst pattern is a popular one among manufacturers, you may have a stamp, die, or paper with this type of design on it which makes for a great background to your sentiment. The sunburst in the image also makes me think of old school style circus advertising, so any circus theme could work.
• Layering/folding – the design on the cushions could be easily translated to a card with different papers layering over each other diagonally. The origami items make me think of folding, and there are plenty of simple and fancy folding techniques in cardmaking. You can get creative with your scoreboard, and even just use scored lines as a decorative feature. Or as above, a die that makes a mini envelope is another way of featuring a folded element. Or indeed a die that scores an opening like a little window that reveals a surprise image or sentiment.
• Foiling – feature a metallic foiled element, if you have a foiling system then there’s plenty of scope to use it for this prompt. Otherwise, foiled papers, foiled ephemera, even some heat embossing with metallic embossing powders would fit the bill.
• In the round – there are circles, dots, and spheres galore in the image, so plenty of ways you can incorporate round things on your cards, even if it’s just sequins, enamel dots, or Nuvo drops.
• All lined up – like the pencils and origami items shown, you can line up similar things in a row like 3 pot plants, a row of birthday candles, a grid of hearts.

I hope those ideas have got your imagination going!

Happy crafting!