Artful Thursday – Card Making

After: 

Two weeks ago I had cut papers to make cards and I looked at them today, frozen with indecision.  I didn’t know what to do first!  I figured I needed a process, or nothing was going to get done.  I’m underlining all the steps I did – for you readers and for myself – so I can use this blog post as a reference when I want to make cards again in the future.

The first step was to gather some materials - (took a while because this led to more necessary organizing and cleaning up.)   I had cards and envelopes and the decorative papers to start.  I have dozens upon dozens of rubber stamps but knew I didn’t want to do extensive coloring – so I just grabbed two sets of stamps and only two colors of ColorBox Chalk inks in addition to black ink.  Somehow I’ve misplaced my small detail scissor – took that as an omen to save time and not do much fussy-cutting.  Found a couple of brads, rub-ons, sticky gems,  ribbons and  flower embellishments.

Before:

I thought cutting the paper was the hard part, but gluing it down was just as intimidating with it’s permanence…. but I jumped ahead anyway and decided to round all the corners and ink all the edges with the chalk inks, adding some depth to the papers.  Then it was easy to glue them down onto some white cards.  (It’s like cutting into that 1/4 yard of special fabric – you don’t want to mess up because then it will be all gone!…. but what am I saving it for??)

I could have left the cards like this, not much different than many store-bought blank cards, but that’s not what Artful Thursday is about, is it?

I had two sets of stamps that I hadn’t taken out of the package yet – a cute Mr. Bear from A Muse, and Notice the Details from Close to My Heart.  So, I grabbed some coordinating solid papers and started stamping away, layering and drawing lines around the different images.  When these are ready to be mailed, I’ll add numbers or hearts to the calendar strips.  A couple of the cards called out to have pop-ups added, and I glued down some flowers, ribbon bows and used some of the rub-ons.  Before I knew it, the day had ended.  I still have a bunch of cards with papered fronts that haven’t been embellished – I’ll work on those again in the future.  Best of all, I have a dozen cards finished!

I used to do lots of paper crafting, (as you can see by my stash of supplies), but it’s been a while and working on these jogged my creativity a little.

Do you ever branch out and work on crafts that you’re not a pro at? just for fun?

2 comments Artful Thursday, challenge, creativity, paper