St. Patrick's Day Subway Art Card

St. Patrick's Day is almost here - just two more days.  Celebrations for St. Patrick's Day vary depending on where you live - in the Boston area it is a big holiday with parties and a parade.  You have to remember to wear something green so you will be protected from getting pinched. 

If you want to send (or hand deliver) a St. Patrick's Day card to someone this weekend this simple card can be ready in a jiffy!  Best of all, the word panel is a freebie this month from Lettering Delights. You can find the freebies by clicking HERE.  You can create an account on this page (and get a huge bundle of members only freebies).  Then click on "specials" and "bonus freebies" to find the monthly free items.  You can also follow Lettering Delights on Facebook for even more freebies.

You can use the Silhouette Studio software to set up the subway art to print for your card.  You don't need to have a Silhouette machine to finish this project since you will only print the image with your regular home printer.  The basic software is available free on the Silhouette site HERE.  If you are thinking about getting a Silhouette machine, it is a good idea to download the software to see if you will be comfortable using it.  I have found the software to be very user friendly and there is good telephone support available from the company.

After I "purchased" the subway art freebie from the Lettering Delights, I downloaded it, unzipped the file and saved the image.

Then I simply dragged the image from my file to the mat in the Silhouette software.  As you can see in the screen shot above, the image will be huge so some resizing is needed.

I wanted to mat the subway art on an A2 card so I needed it to measure 5 x 3.75 inches.  To adjust the size, I drew a rectangle in the software and used it as a guide.  When I resized the image the dimensions were 5.695 x 4.430 inches.  I moved the rectangle I had drawn to the front and then used the crop option in the Modify menu to cut away the white outer edges of the image.

I was able to set up four images to print on one sheet of 8 1/2 x 11 matte photo paper.  Since these are simple rectangles I decided to just print and then use a trimmer to cut them to size.  This enabled me to fit more images on one page since I didn't need the registration marks you normally use to print and cut.

A few quick cuts with the trimmer and I had the card front trimmed to size.  You can make your own subway art using lots of fonts and phrases to suit an occasion or holiday but it does take a fair bit of time to do one - so thanks to Lettering Delights for the freebie!

 I cut a base card of dark green Bazzill cardstock and a mat layer of lighter green glittered cardstock (Core Couture from Core'dinations).  The printed card topper is nice but it needed a bit of dressing up to make a more interesting card.

 Some of the letters are in a circus type font so I tried using my gold pen to highlight these.

This was rather tedious to do and even though there is a definite metallic sheen to the ink the result was not as interesting as I had hoped it would be.

So I pulled out my trusty Stickles and highlighted several of the phrases on the card.  While I was doing this, I decided that the F. Scott Fitzgerald quite was a little too prominent for my taste and I wanted only the word "luck" to stand out.

I used my Martha Stewart four leaf clover punch and punched out two dark green and one glittered clover.  A shamrock actually has only three sections but it is commonly confused with the lucky four leaf clover so you will find them used interchangeably (but the true Irish symbol is the shamrock!).

I punched the two darker clovers from opposite sides of the cardstock so they would be mirror images.  These two were stuck down directly to the card, covering the "obnoxious" word but I bent the leaves up a little.  A foam circle raises up the glittered clover.

Now the card has some more dimension and the work "Luck" forms the base for the cluster of clover.

I restrained myself and only "stickled" three phrases, "kiss me" "luck of the Irish" and "no pinching" - these form a diagonal from the top left to the bottom right of the card.

The finishing touch was a green gem sticker in the center of the glittered clover.  Once you have set up the file to print the toppers, you could easily make quite of few of these cards - just be sure to allow for drying tine for the Stickles.

Lettering Delights has some St. Patrick's Day items on sale right now - they are found in the "What's New" section and are just $1 or $2, until Sunday the 17th.

Whenever I am on the Lettering Delights site I always end up browsing around and find lots of goodies to add to my cart and my collection. Here are a couple of discount codes that will help if you start filling a cart!

Save 35% when you spend at least $15 with coupon code MarchMadness.
Save 55% when you spend at least $40 with coupon code MonsterMadness.

The weather has turned cold again here and we have a weekend full of plans - I hope it warms up at least a little.  Do you have any special plans for St. Patrick's Day?  Do you make a special meal to celebrate?  Have fun, whatever your plans are for the weekend!

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