ATC by Juliet Arrighi, guest designer

Hello again!  I love swapping ATCs - I must have thousands of them - and I'm always looking for some new way to create them.  For this ATC, I'm using the Flower Oval SweetCuts Die, which I wanted to use for glitter techniques as soon as I saw it.  The lines are so thin, but they cut so cleanly!  Here is a scan of the finished ATC - I am happy to tell you how I made it.

I started with the background - really, I gathered a bunch of paper scraps that were on my desk and pieced them onto a scrap of copy paper for a colorblocked effect.  I cut a perfect hole for the SweetCuts flower oval with one of the Little Stackers oval dies - it is exactly the right size, and I can save the oval for another project (I don't waste much!)

 Here you can see both of the dies, and how they cut.  The die is just under two inches wide, so I was able to use clear packing tape for the next part.

Here I flipped the background and the oval flower diecut and nested them, and covered the hole with clear packing tape. (you can see that this was literally a recycled scrap - the lines and numbers on the paper don't mean anything to this project)  At this point, I really pressed hard to make sure it was all well adhered.  The reason I'm working on a craft sheet is that the tape will not stick permanently to it.

Flipping it right side up, I  filled all the holes in the diecut with iridescent transparent glitter.  It would be beautiful with just the glitter, but I want color too!

 Now, working from the back, on the smooth clear plastic of the packing tape, I colored in the flowers with permanent markers.  This is one of the few times that a Bic or Sharpie is better for coloring than a Copic.  I left the background white for contrast, but a color would have been nice, too.

After I colored the flowers, I put some white paper behind the hole, then trimmed and layered it to ATC size.  I couldn't resist adding a little embellishment!

 I hope you will try making ATCs - it is a great way to showcase your papercrafting without using up a lot of materials.