It’s time for another Pinterest Challenge, that time of the month when I join the Pinterest Challenge organised by My Pinterventures. We all rummage through our pinterest boards and find a project to actually try out.

This month I’ve been inspired by 2 pins. This is mostly because my first attempt was a big fat fail!

I started with the intention to do some wax resist art on watercolour paper. The pin that inspired me was this one.

You probably did this art method as a kid, you draw a picture with a white wax crayon on white paper and then when you paint over the top with watercolours your picture appears by magic.

I took a small piece of watercolour paper and drew a simple bunch of flowers a white wax crayon. I don’t have any watercolour paints so I used my Caran d’Ache watercolour pencils. I coloured rainbow stripes with the pencils and then swooshed water over the paper with a paint brush.

Can you see what went wrong?!!

I don’t know if it was because I used watercolour pencils or that I didn’t press hard enough with my white wax crayon.

Honestly I found this much more difficult than I thought it would be! I couldn’t see what I was drawing at all.

Not one to waste anything I decided to use this piece of watercolour paper in a slightly different way.

Back to Pinterest!

This time I came across this pin, a notebook cover with tropical leaves cut out of inked paper. It inspired me to make some summery leaf greeting cards.

How to make summery watercolour rainbow leaf greeting cards

To make your own Watercolour Leaf Greeting cards you will need:

Blank Greeting cards - any size you like, I made my own from plain card
Watercolour paper
Watercolour pencils or paints
A craft knife - mine is an X-Acto knife, you could use small sharp scissors instead
Foam Pads
Scraps of colourful embroidery thread

Prepare the watercolour paper with a colourful wash

I needed more colourful watercolour paper for this to work so I coloured another couple of watercolour paper sheets. This time I pressed a little harder with the rainbow colours to get a brighter look.

I did a page with greens and blues too, just to mix things up.

Cut out leaf shapes

I drew a few simple leave shapes on the back in pencil and then cut them out with a craft knife. I love my X-acto craft knife, it’s one of my favourite papercraft tools. It came in a plain wooden box but you can read here about how I painted it using a really simple technique to make it pretty. You could use small sharp scissors if you don’t have a craft knife.

Assemble the card

Use the foam pads to attach a couple of the leaves to the blank card. Put foam pads all over the back of the underneath leaf and attach it in the middle. Then decide the position you want for the top leaf and only put foam pads on the overhanging bits.

Add a bow with a few different strands of embroidery thread.

I punched some flowers out of the scraps of the water coloured paper just to finish it off and found a couple of pearly flat gems in my craft stash.

There you have it, summery greeting cards to send to your friends. Ideal to let them know you are thinking of them, especially if you can’t be together right now.

Julie

I’ll be sharing this project at these link ups.

For more Pinterest inspired projects from this month's Pinterest Challenge hosts, check out the links below