Today I have a pair of cards that were made with paper piecing dies using several colorful Pop Tone cardstocks. Paper piecing popularity is a trend that has come and go over time and it's making a strong comeback again this year. It results in beautiful textured and layered pieces.
Success with paper piecing comes with a little patience and good cardstock. Pop Tone cardstock carried by CutCardStock is a perfect paper piecing cardstock because it comes in many beautiful colors and is the perfect weight for this technique. It accepts markers, light water coloring and inks without deteriorating. Its solid core color and smooth surface makes it a pleasure to cut and shade. These are all necessary cardstock characteristics for successful paper piecing.
I chose two dies and 7 colors of Pop Tone cardstock for my card images: Sweet Tooth, Limeade, Wild Cherry, Tangy Orange, Banana Split, Pink Lemonade, Grape Jelly. Are you hungry yet? The line has such yummy sounding names! As great as that is, there's so much more to choose from with 24 different color options.
I prefer to cut a paper piecing die out of each color of cardstock so that I have a full pallet of color choices available. Tip: I will color white pieces with a marker if I don't have quite the shade I want available or if there are only a few small pieces needed in a color. I always keep extra pieces not used in the die packaging for the future. This comes in handy the next time the die is used.
Good organization is key to paper piecing because the number of pieces can become overwhelming to manage if you allow them to be mixed together. Tip: Once cut, I like to store them by color in a small spice bowl. This makes it easy to keep the colors separate and pull colors I need as I'm piecing. A tweezers can really come in handy when piecing because some of the shapes can be too tiny to handle with your fingers.
I enjoy adding shading and other details to the pieces. I used Tombow Dual brush markers and a blending marker to do this on my cuts today. Once finished, I arrange the die cut following the illustrations on the die packaging. I also use foam tape to create layering and dimension. Usually there's enough pieces left over to create another image which is what I did here. I'll use this bird and flowers on another card soon.
Once the images were pieced, I placed them on a fancy shape cut from Classic Linen White Pearl cardstock in white. The word Hello was cut 6 times and each have 3 layers to form a thick word. I ran two pieces of Rinea paper through a Sizzix Texture Fades embossing folder and placed them on card bases made from additional Pop Tones cardstock before arranging the finished pieced images on the card front. I added a narrow flag sentiment cut from additional PopTone Sweet Tooth cardstock to each card. These were heat embossed with black fine detail embossing powder.If you are interested in trying paper piecing or bringing out some older dies you have in your stash for this technique, make sure you start with quality cardstock so that you have a great experience putting them together. You cannot go wrong by checking out the CutCardStock line of Pop Tone. It's reasonably priced and great quality. Best of all, it's on sale this month!
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