39 Rue des Cartes

There’s a new girl in town and she’s crafty! (Does anyone else have that Beastie Boys song in their head now?)

The first in a series of – oh, yes, there’s more to come –  “Leading Ladies” by Brandi Kincaid for the Essentials by Ellen line at Ellen Hutson. And while this little beauty is in a set with some laugh-out-loud crafty goodness, she’s great for “everyday” cards like this one too.

What I dig most about Brandi’s Crafty Lady is that she can be ANY lady. I see a lot of my friends in her (and once I have a stash of Leading Ladies with different hairstyles? There they’ll be – every lady I know)!

I wanted to give her some funky clothes and went to one of my favorite old-school techniques to do it: paper piecing. In this case, I picked up a few digital card kits from Brandi’s website and used the 3×4 card designs to dress her up, mixing lots of different patterns.

All those little rectangles in the bottom of the shot above are different digital cards I printed and stamped on like any other piece of patterned paper.

I opened the files in Photoshop and resized them to print smaller so the scale worked a bit better for her clothing. (Not a step you HAVE to do – you could just download, print, and stamp – but I thought the scale worked a bit better smaller.)

To finish her look, I did a little coloring with Copics, adding a few freckles with a fine tip brown pen, and adhered the pieces I stamped and cut. (Heather Campbell has a great video on paper piecing in The CLASSroom this week if you’d like a little refresher.)

The final touches were layering her over a galaxy background made with a bit of watercoloring and adding a DIY typewritten sentiment to fit the cosmos theme.

supplies used:
essentials by ellen, leading ladies – crafty lady stamp set
essentials by ellen, crafty lady dies
memento ink pad, tuxedo black
neenah cardstock, solar white
strathmore watercolor paper
copic markers: E15, E18, E21, E71, E74, Y17, BG10
copic opaque white
brandi kincaid, ramona digital journal cards
brandi kincaid, laura digital journal cards