Echo Park Hello Easter 6×6 Paper Pad
I’ve had the cards done for quite awhile but just haven’t gotten around to posting them. With Easter just days away I needed to stop procrastinating.
I have several spring paper collections, but only 1 that was specifically Easter – Echo Park’s Hello Easter. The 6×6 paper pad included 2 sheets of 2×3 inch sentiment cut-aparts and I decided to use those first. Besides the traditional “Happy Easter” there were several other cute sentiments that coordinated with the pattern paper.
For the first few cards I used patterned paper for the backgrounds. As you’ll see in the later cards, I pulled in solid colored cardstock and shimmer paper for the backgrounds. Other than fish-tailing or rounding the corners I left the sentiment cut-aparts at 2×3 inches. As most of the papers were bright colors with busy prints I only included 1-2 different patterned papers on each cards. As I expect most of the cards will be mailed, I wanted to keep them fairly flat so that no extra postage would be required. With that in mind, I used Love from Lizi peel-offs and smaller “bling” from Queen and Co. to add some sparkle and shine to the cards.
One of my favorite papers was the Easter eggs with all the bright happy colors. I tried to use it as the focal panel on several of the cards. Another paper I really liked was the chocolate bunnies. All of the bunnies had bright colored bows, but with the pink background I tended to pair it with the tiny brown and pink print paper.
The next 2 cards both use a busy graphic print for the backgrounds. Initially I thought that might be too much with the focal panels, but I think it worked.
The next card is very “clean” using only the pink plaid paper and a small strip of a tone-on-tone gingham print. It turned out to be one of my favorite cards. The second card also only used one patterned paper and a small strip of a tone-on-tone green print but has quite a different feel to it.
After making 12 cards and using all of the sentiment cut-aparts, there weren’t any full sheets of paper that I liked for backgrounds. Instead I pulled in some cardstock. I still had full sheets of the chick print paper and decided to use one of my go-to sketches. The sketch features a large focal panel perfect for highlighting a patterned paper. The second card uses a layout where multiple different papers created the background. Other than the matting, all of the papers were pieces from the paper pad.
I’m not sure why, but I struggled with this bunny print. I ended up pairing it with the pink tone-on-tone paper on a white shimmer paper background. The next card was a great way to use up smaller pieces and feature different papers. This was just one of a few cards I made using this layout.
For the last 2 cards, I only had a couple larger pieces of paper and several small scraps left. I was able to pair up a few of the larger pieces to make the second card. For the remaining pieces, I paired them with several of the smaller scraps to create the first card. I actually quite like the mix of all the different papers. It could easily get too clutter but I think separating the busy prints with tone-on-tone papers made it work.
In addition to the sentiment cut-aparts, I also used stamp sets by Paper Tray Ink and Recollections. Along with the paper pad I used several sheets of cardstock and shimmer paper which allowed me to stretch the paper pad to over 35 cards. A few have already made it to my antique booth, but the rest will be donated to Cards for Soldiers.