I love stamping, and I am always looking for different ways I can use my stamps and crafty stash to create different looks. One look that I’ve found particularly fun to create is a mosaic effect. The definition of a mosaic is a picture or pattern produced by arranging small pieces of materials such as stone, tile, or glass together and the same results can be achieved in papercrafting.

There are quite a few different ways to this look, suiting a range of abilities; from simply trimming the paper or image into sections for a clean-looking, elegant mosaic style to a cheat’s mosaic, which is my personal favourite. The cheat’s mosaic involves simply creating the effect of the tiles without the fiddly cutting out. You can see on my ‘Have a beautiful day’ card that I have used a honeycomb-patterned embossing folder to provide a tiled effect and randomly coloured in several of the hexagons to achieve the look.

As you can see from my ‘Beautiful day’ card, the mosaic element of the design doesn't necessarily have to focus on the main image. Why not consider using the style for backgrounds? Create your own mosaic backgrounds as I’ve done on my ‘Happy birthday’ card by cutting the sticky parts of Post It notes into strips, placing them over a card front to create a mosaic mask and sponging ink through them.

You can have fun with a plethora of techniques to achieve this look; I’ve featured stamping, embossing, masking, colouring and even heat-embossing to achieve the look. I especially enjoyed the technique of pressing an inked stamp into warm, melted embossing powder for my ‘Birthday flower’ card

Whatever technique you decide to use to create your mosaic masterpiece, remember that you can also change the look again by altering the number of tiles used, if you're using the same materials and basic card design, for a great effect.

I have really enjoyed the exploration and research of this new (to me) technique and I know that you too can achieve it with your own style, equipment and tools from your crafting stash.

1

Create a white 3” square card blank and punch a 2½” circle from Elegant Eggplant cardstock.

2

Stamp the flower onto white cardstock and punch the flower head out using the out 1¾” circle punch.

3

Cut the flower head into sections as shown, preferably using a trimmer to achieve straight edges.

4

Arrange the cut pieces from Step 3 onto the punched circle from Step 1 as shown using 3D foam pads.