If you want to go above and beyond for someone and create an especially elegant card, you’re reading the right blog post. Wax seals are all the rage again, bringing elegance from yonder years back in your craft room. And they work so well with the beautiful and understated letterpress look you can create with the Spellbinders BetterPress.
For this first card I used the stunning Cosmos Backdrop press plate from Spellbinders to create a tone on tone background on some light pink cardstock. Tone on tone backgrounds are a great way to add interest to your card without taking any attention away from the focal point like these dainty Sealed Blooms and an ornate wax seal. The wax seal stamp I used is the Spellbinders Wax Seal of The Month for January (it’s a great subscription for every stationery lover, you get a wax seal stamp and a packet of 100 wax beads each month!). I made my own mix of colors for the seal using 1 bead of Green, 2 beads of Fern, and 1 bead of Pistachio.
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This long stemmed elegant bouquet from the A Friend Like You Bouquet press plate set is perfect to add a wax seal to. I used the Porcelain Betterpress Cotton Cardstock for this image along with Ecoline liquid watercolors. I highly recommend these watercolors for BetterPress in particular because they’re completely transparent and won’t cover or dull the color of the BetterPress outline, and I love a crisp black outline. (That being said, a darker color of completely transparent paint will still affect a lighter color of ink!). This wax seal stamp is included in the Wax Seal Starter Kit and I used the new Misty wax beads because they complemented the colors of my image very nicely.
Now these two press plates are designed to fit in the Spellbinders Sealed Collection, which is all about wax seals! So you have a little bundle of long stemmed florals from the Sealed Florals press plate which I colored using my Faber-Castell Polychromos pencils and then there’s that Sealed Cord press plate as well. This Sealed Cord & Faux Seal Sentiments press plate set is actually a great one to get even if you don’t want to start collection all the wax seal things because it includes 6 sentiments that fit in a small circle (circle die included in the press plate set) and you can adhere those over the cord image to replicate a wax seal!
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Lastly, if you’re still looking for more ideas to incorporate wax seals on your cards, you can look for any stamp or die set that has a circle element to it and simply cover that up or replace it with a wax seal. If you have a large sentiment or you use alphabet dies, you could even replace an O with a wax seal, I’ve sent a lot of JOY Christmas cards this year doing exactly that. Now this Floral Reflection die set can definitely be used without the circle element, but there is a circle die included to fit a sentiment right in the center of this image. Believe me, if some clever designer thought “this could use a circle right here”, it can definitely use a wax seal right there as well!
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