Red Hat words

The awesome thing (to me) about this card is not the card itself, but the paper. I made that, with a little software support. It took a long time, but like all things on the computer, once you have it, you have it forever.


I started out feeding words into wordle, and tweaking it to get a nice cloud. I was a little frustrated, because when you make a word cloud, you don't get repeats of words, you get your more frequently used words to show up larger. I finally grabbed the cloud I made and brought it into Paint Shop Pro, and did a pattern edit to add extra words and to make it into a seamless tile. I then printed it out to make Red Hat Society cards.

This turned out to be a horrible idea. If you have words in your patterned paper, it is almost impossible use any kind of sentiment on your card. I was also having a hard time coloring the hat stamps to match - I may have to resort to paper piecing. In the interim, these nice organdy flowers seemed to work well. The background paper was digitally textured, too. Most cardmakers know about printing out an image to color, fewer know about printing textures on a background. If you print a color on a similarly colored cardstock, you save a lot on printer ink.

I whipped this up for the Saturday Spotlight Challenge, and the Sunflowers and Dragonflies Flower Power challenge. It isn't a headturner, but sometimes, clean and simple is all you need.