(With apologies to Dirty Dancing, I didn’t carry a watermelon…I crafted fourteen of them!)
A little review for the new readers: my current craft is making greeting cards. I’m a member of MetaFilter’s Card Club, meaning not only do I get to send happy mail every month, but twice a year I receive my own happy mail from others. I chose to receive cards in March to celebrate the beginning of spring and September for my birthday.
And being on the hook for sending ten cards out each month keeps me crafting regularly.
While the idea for the June cards came easily, I was pretty stumped when it came to July. I did know I wanted something summery. Summer…beach…picnics…summer fruit…watermelon? Watermelon! Watermelon is a quintessential summer fruit.
I cruised around on Pinterest for some inspiration. My beautiful, beautiful Pinterest is quickly falling victim to an overwhelming amount of AI-generated pictures, but so far my card inspo images still seem to be human-made.
I didn’t want to paint this month. In fact, I wanted to keep it as simple as possible.
Luckily, watermelons are a basically a series of circles layered together with black dots on them. I have circle dies and a lot of plain colored cardstock. I cut large green circles, slightly smaller light yellow circles, and slightly smaller red circles. For my prototype, I used a hole punch on a black scrap paper to make some watermelon seeds. I was initially concerned that the red/green combo would look too Christmassy, but once I placed the seeds, the design clearly read as “watermelon.”
I let this idea sit and simmer a bit, and I came up with a twist: stamping small hearts to serve as the seeds. I immediately loved this idea. It’s adorable.
Best of all, the whole thing came together quickly. After cutting out 21 circles, I glued them into seven round watermelons. Cutting them in half gave me 14 watermelon slices to work with. Stamping the seeds went fast, because watermelon seeds aren’t meant to be precise.
For the card fronts I stamped a “hello” greeting in black onto white cardstock. And this is the regret that gnaws at me: I should have used black cardstock and white embossing powder. Black was already present on the watermelon seeds. Using white introduces a brand new color. Booo. Maybe when I make my August cards I’ll recreate one watermelon card with a black greeting background to see if I was right.
But once I hand-cut fourteen hellos from white cardstock, I wasn’t going back. Hand-cutting around a pre-decorated area is called fussy cutting — and I HATE fussy cutting. One of the card YouTubers I follow, Ralph Tyndall, recommends spring-loaded scissors for fussy cutting, and while I’ve been dead set on using only the craft supplies that I have on hand… I may splurge on a new pair.
The paper I used for the backgrounds is from an older pad designed by Amber of Damask Love. I chose them for their bright colors. I still used the watermelons with the hole-punched seeds — because they are perfectly fine — and paired them with a luxe tropical leaf background to make up for the lack of stamped hearts.
I used foam tape to raise the “hello” greeting off the background. I like foam tape in moderation to give a bit of pop, even if the greeting would have looked better as white on black. OK, OK, I’ll quit obsessing about the greeting!
I am REALLY pleased with how these turned out. They are definitely one of my favorite designs.
Even if … I know. I know.
I’m already working on my August cards and I’m bringing out the watercolor palette back out. Stay tuned!
