Talk About Chalk

I've posted quite a few iris folding patterns up on Craftsuprint and they are probably my best selling range.  Fun to make and a wonderful way of using up all sort of oddments they must be the ultimate green cards.  Usually they have plain backgrounds (ie whatever color card you have chosen) but this is a bit boring.  How about some backgrounds?  

There are a great many ways of doing these of course.  You could paint (or crayon, or pencil) one, stick dow some patterned paper, use patterned card...or use chalks.

You can buy sets of chalks inexpensively from many places and they come in sets and remind me of eyeshadow palettes.  Here is one:

A basic set similar to mine.  You can also buy sparkly ones and I keep meaning to do so!

You will also need some cotton wool to apply the chalk.  I usually tear up one of those flat round pads and use a third per color.  

Now you need a blank white greetings card (this one is 7" x 5") preferably non-glossy and some templates.  If you buy one of my Poppies Iris Folding Card sheets you will get four.  Two clouds, a treeline and a line of grass.  Trace around them, transfer the tracings to card and you have your templates.  If you want to use them lots of times you could make the templates from one of those thin plastic sheets used for glass painting.

Fold the card in half and work with it landscape style.  Chalk up a piece of cotton wool with pale blue chalk and lay down the two clouds.  Apply chalk around them until your card looks like this:

Note that you haven't chalked all the way down, just over halfway.  Now lay down your treeline template and apply some mid green chalk to another piece of cotton wool.  Rub chalk onto the trees until you reach just where they stop, then apply lighter green chalk below this, and finally yellow chalk below that.

Finally lay down your grass template at the bottom of the page and apply some darker green chalk for the grass.  The finished background now looks like this:

Ta da!  Now you have your field where poppies are going to grow.  Or any of my other floral patterns.  The chalk is (as far as I know) environmentally friendly and you are using up oddments for the iris folding, so behold one green card.