The Essentials by Ellen Leading Ladies stamps and dies are perfect for creating sweet, handmade cards for Mother’s Day! Check out these fabulous ideas from EH Design Ambassador Kelly Griglione!
The nice thing about using the Leading Ladies for your Mother’s Day cards is that you can send a surrogate of yourself when you can’t be there yourself. For this card I tried to color the Teacher Lady to resemble myself, and the Grand Lady to resemble my mom.
Since we’re not able to be together physically this year, it made me especially happy to figure out how to get the ladies to lock arms. On both lady dies, starting from their “armpit” I made a cut extending up about 1/2″ (indicated where the green arrow is above). This extra room allows their arms to interlock.
Also, while we’re looking closely at this section of the card, I’ll point out another fun detail. Grand Lady is sporting a fancy, gold embossed necklace! This is one of the reasons I love the Leading Lady sets … they come with so many fun accessories that you can mix and match across the ladies.
What a team they look like, right?! Grand lady’s dress has been enhanced with a pattern made by brushing ink through a stencil (using the same color as her dress). I added three “MOM” dies to the background. The main sentiment is from the That Thing You Did set and embossed in gold.
Another card, that’s especially timely, re-purposes a cloud die as a thought bubble! Lots of thoughts of Mom when you’re sheltering in place, and what better way to let her know than to visually build your card around this idea.
Since you’re just stamping her head she’s a lot easier to color. The background of the card is brushed with ink, and I’ve added some texture with stencils. This one is Altenew’s Feeling Dotty.
The sentiment is from Totally Random Sayings Vol. 3 and the alpha dies are the Classic Block Alphas. These alpha dies are meant to hinge open, but I elected to use them as “normal” letters this time and just cut them off along the hinged line.
Now I do admit that sometimes, especially when I’m tight on time, I get a little overwhelmed with needing to color the ladies and making all those color choices. One idea to get around this is to think in the negative.
Don’t color the ladies, but color everything else!
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. For this card I stamped the Little Lady in the middle of the card, put a mask on top of her (made by stamping her onto a piece of copy paper and fussy cutting around her), then stamped the Grand Lady and Cat Lady on either side.
I used the Classic Block Alphas dies on all three cards so far. To color these I used the waves background stamp from Winterscapes and stamped it horizontally and vertically. The blue wasn’t standing out as much as I hoped, so I outlined everything with a white gel pen.
Another detail to work in is the gold thread, which I tied to the sentiment.
Then after masking all three ladies, I blended a rainbow of ink on the background. I could have left it there, but I wanted a little more going on, so before removing the masks I layered a stencil on top and blended some more ink. And then a little gold spatter for good measure!
The sentiment strip is from the That Thing You Did set.
Finally, this is the card I made as I was packing things up, and blogged about it earlier in the EH Mother’s Day Compilation post. Just goes to show, if you have a quick idea for a card, go ahead and make it before you put everything away!
Lots of options to reach across the miles this year with the Essentials by Ellen leading ladies on Mother’s Day! Either way you create them, by coloring the ladies, or coloring outside the ladies, you end up with some cute cards!
Thanks so much for stopping by! Hope you are staying safe and healthy!
– Kelly
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3 Comments
These cards are delightful. What mom wouldn’t want to receive one? tfs-stay well.
Super special cards thank you fora really helpful blog post.
Just lovely, and the sentiments are right on target. Thank you.