Stamping… Over the Rainbow

Posted By Phil on July 14, 2007

For a first project, I decided it would be fun to design a card with a New Mexican theme. I’m a native to New Mexico, so I’m naturally drawn to all sorts of stuff reminiscent of the culture. For this card, I wanted something simple. I had originally set out to use five different stamps for this card (rather ambitious of me, I know), but wound up using only three of them.

The card ended up with the following three stamps:

“Greetings From Albuquerque #2″ from Stamp A Mania (Las Cruces, NM, 2004)
“Mini Zia” from Stamp A Mania (Las Cruces, NM, 2007)
“Fiesta Muy Caliente” from Stamp A Mania (Las Cruces, NM, 2006)

You might notice that all three stamps are made by Stamp A Mania. This company is based here in New Mexico, and makes a variety of New Mexican and southwestern stamps. Hence why, for this project, I used only their stamps.

The design I originally had in mind was to place the “Muy Caliente” stamp at the top of the card, the “Greetings From Albuquerque” stamp at the below, and four zia symbols around the “Greeting” stamp, sort of vicariously representing the four directions.

Before I even started, though, I changed my mind and decided I wanted the Zia symbol to actually be representative of the New Mexican flag. I thought three would be a nice number. So I got some yellow paper and then embossed three Zia symbols with red embossing powder. (Please forgive the quality of the image, as I was having digital camera issues.)

When it came time to stamp the word stamps, I decided I wanted to do sort of a mirror image with the flag. So I got red paper, and some gold embossing powder, and ended up quite pleased with the result.

Now that I had everything stamped, it was only a matter of putting it on the card. I cut out all the pieces first, and experimented with placement on the card (I opted for a light green color for the card). I placed my word stamps at the top and bottom, as planned, but when I tried to get the flags all onto the card, only two wound up fitting. So I tossed one aside.

For the words, I decided I wanted a New Mexican theme for the cut of the paper, so I cut the paper around the edges so that it appeared as much of the wooden frames for porches are done: with a lot of 90-degree angles, and multiple “steps” to enhance the effect. Next, I mounted the words on first yellow paper behind the words, for consistency, and then to brown, for contrast as well as a deeper southwestern feel. Finally, I cut two strips of brown paper into thin columns and created poles for my two New Mexico flags. Here’s the completed card:

It was a very fun card to create. Because I took pictures during the process of creating, I found it neat to look at how the creative process changes. While making some other cards for some friends’ birthdays this week, I noticed a similar progression. Seems to me that every time I start a card, it ends up looking quite a bit different than I had originally imagined it. But really, that’s just the joy of card-making.

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