Olympic Inspired Cards

Happy Monday!

I hope you all had a super Valentine's Day ~ as you may (or may not) have read we have a new member at our house...Cupid a little bull calf was born on Valentine's Day.  He is doing great ~ eating, up and around checking things out.  His dad was baby sitting him on Saturday...how funny it is to see a 1500 lb bull watching over a little bitty calf!

Last Thursday I started telling you about my Olympic Inspired Technique... when I left I was cutting out all of the diamonds I had traced onto the stamped backgrounds.

As you can see I was left with a huge pile with all sorts of sizes to choose from.

The next step was to ink the edges of all of the pieces large and small....again, this was very time consuming but oddly enough I found it very relaxing - LOL!!  I know, give me a bit of ink to play in and I'll entertain myself for hours.

Here are all of the pieces finally inked!!!

Now for the fun part...begin layering the diamonds as desired!  I knew I wanted at least one card that reflected the inspiration of the Russian Patchwork Quilt design.  This card took the most diamonds and time to construct.

I was so into this I totally forgot to take "in the process photos" but basically I started off by gluing a set of diamonds randomly across the card panel.  I then added another layer directly on the cardstock - these diamonds partially covered the first layer.  Next, I used a thin double stick foam tape to add my first dimensional layer of diamonds and finally I used a thicker type of double stick foam tape for the last few triangles.

I have to say I LOVE how it turned out!

After that I just had fun and used the diamonds to create a variety of patterns....

And here are my finished cards....

I struggled a bit with this one, I didn't want to cover the background but it needed something so I die-cut "congratulations!" and glued it to the upper most layer of diamonds.  I really like how it turned out.

And here are the rest...

While this technique/idea was a bit time consuming it's not difficult at all and I was rewarded with several really cool cards!  Also, I wanted to point out you don't necessarily have to use diamonds, I did because that's the design featured in the Olympic inspiration ~ you could use circles, squares, triangles, rectangles, etc...  Also, if you die-cut the shapes that would also save lots of time in the whole process.

Anyway, I hope you take a bit of inspiration from my inspiration!