I wanted to make a ‘versatile’ card. A card for almost any occasion. So … I knew I’d have to be able to change the sentiment on the card in order to make the card versatile. So this is the ‘story’ of one card, and, just for the photos – four different sentiments.
Hello …. friend? Maybe? Haven’t seen you for ages? How are you? Or maybe ‘Hello’ on the front, and ‘Get well’ inside? Or …. Hello, Happy Birthday?
Made on a 6″x 6″ white card, and using Dovecraft ‘Couture du Jour‘ papers and decoupage pad as a background paper, and for the pocket (for the tags).
I decoupaged the main focal image, and it has 5 layers in total.
“With Love” …. because you’re not feeling too well? “With Love” because … I love you? “With Love” … just because? “With Love” … on your Birthday?
The tags (in the pocket on the front) were stamped on plain white card, using stamps by Viva Decor. They’re really fabulous crisp images which stamp clearly from the word go.
The tags were then ‘vintaged’ and layered on some green print paper, again from the Couture du Jour papers by Dovecraft. I used some pastel chalks on the tags, in various places – on the one tag, I turned the stamped image of a bird into a blue bird. And on the other tag, I coloured up the stamped image of a rose, using three different colours of chalks.
These are chalks I’ve had for … y.e.a.r.s! I have two large sets of them – both made by Dovecraft. They give a lovely soft, fuzzy sort of colour to things. I really like them.
“Thinking of You” . . . well this one speaks for itself.
The heart hat pins are ones which are generally available. I think I bought mine on Ebay years ago. I wanted some red ones, but had to buy a whole set in order to get the red ones. tsk tsk. No wonder my craft room has no space … it’s filled with ‘left overs’! lol. 🙂
“Just for You” . . . because you deserve it. “Just for You” because you’re amazing. “Just for You” . . . to say thank you for looking after out house while we were on holiday? “Just for You” … because you’re a great help to me? “Just for You” … just because. . . . or for a million other reasons.
The dragonflyover on the right (about a quarter of the way down) is from a selection by Anitas, and the peg with the pink heart on it – down in the bottom left corner, is from the Santoro range. And it’s this mini peg which enables me to change the sentiment on the card. Virtually any sentiment can be held by that peg and it makes the card suitable for pretty much anyone. I’ve just stamped four different sentiments to show you … and added some really pretty glitter – but you could stamp anything you wanted.
And that, as they say …. is all there was to it!Ta daaaaah!
Anyhoo ….. Happy Tuesday, 13th June.
Could someone please tell me who stole January to May? And do the police know about this major robbery?
Do you know what’s made me a bit cross and fed up? Create and Craft are having their CHRISTMASIN[fricken]JUNE event. Ho, Ho bl**dyHo!
Now they (Create & Craft) say (on their website) that it’s only till the 25th June … however, I remember last year and the year before … they said the same sort of thing, and Christmas never went away after their Christmas Event, so I have no hope that they’re going to change their ways and make Christmas in June, July, August, September, or October disappear. [grouch, grouch, grump]
Ah well… I’m sure we’ll survive it. I just won’t be buying anything from them until they stop the madness. 🙂
Wishing you a terrific Tuesday. May the wind be a lazy breeze. May any rains be soft, and feel like a caress as it touches your skin. May the skies be a beautiful blue, and may your day be free of anything which makes your heart ache.
If you’re anything like me, you will look at the freebies which come with crafty magazines, admire them and tell yourself that you’ll make a card with them, or scrap-booking page or do something wonderfully crafty with them … and you pop them to one side. From there they make it to a drawer. Then to the bottom of said drawer. Then you find them when you’re looking for something else and remember you were going to make something with them, so you put them on one side …. and the whole thing goes round and round like a merry-go-round.
Well I told myself that I was to actually make something with my freebies from now on, so I began with these Gorjuss images. Now I’m not a Gorjuss sort of girl. I like the images and think those little girls are just so pretty and so well drawn. But they’re not things I would normally craft with as I don’t kind of have a real ‘feel’ for them. I think they’re kind of ‘too sweet’ for me. (My daughter is the total opposite. She LOVES Gorjuss cards etc.).
I sat and looked at the images , telling myself that I HAD to make four cards or I was NEVER leaving that craft room (not even for a visit to the little girls room). So I did. I made four cards.
All the cards are made on a 6×6″ card base, dècoupaged, matted and layered.
This first card is dècoupaged (although you actually can’t see that it is in this photo) has the addition of Black Lace Washi tape, and some black Stickles at the corners. The envelope is decorated up with a bumble-bee on the flap.I wanted to put a foxes head on the flap of the envelope (as a nod to the fox in the Gorjuss picture) but couldn’t find the darn stamp.
This second card(above) is again dècoupaged, and I simply drew the wriggly lines around the lovely pale mustard layer, to sort of frame the whole thing. The envelope is decorated in the same way, with patchwork hearts to echo the little heart she has in her hair.
Card three (above), dècoupaged, matted, layered and decorated using a very fine nib pen, and I added some buttons using lilac Stickles to bring out the lilac in the Gorjuss girly picture; a teeny mushroom picture which I glossed and added a ribbon too. The envelope is decorated with a dragonfly. (I couldn’t get the light right for this card. The pink spotted background is actually more delicate and pale than it looks in the photo).
Finally … card four.Dècoupage, matted, layered, with the addition of a little ribbon and some Stickles. The envelope has a rabbit’s head on it, to acknowledge that the Gorjuss girl obviously likes rabbits because she’s holding one!
They’re not my usual type of card and I was absolutely outside my comfort zone, but I’ve done my personal challenge and made something with some of my freebies instead of adding continually to my stash. But I’m glad I challenged myself to do them. However – the challenge is ongoing. I still have more freebies stashed away, and I’m determined to use them! (You have been warned.)
All that remains is to wish you a very Happy Monday,and I sincerely hope that you have a lovely start to this new week. Make a memory today. Find one good thing which happened during the day and think about it when you go to bed tonight. Go on … make yourself smile
Have a truly blessed day, my fellow blogging friends and readers.
Although I’ve called this handmade card ‘Just a Note’ – in this particular instance the note is a thank you note, – however, because of the design, you can easily change the ‘subject’ of the card to suit your particular reason for sending it.
The card is based around an angle fold, which conveniently gives you two tag pockets by a nifty little folding trick which I hope to ‘teach’ those of you who may not have come across this style of card before, by using step by step photographs. Shall we begin?
You need a 12″ (inches) by 5″ piece of cardstock. A good weight one, but not one which is so heavy that you find it difficult to fold and score.
I’ve made a diagram of where to score (NOTCUT) the card in the hope of you ‘getting’ it easily. Click on the following photograph to open it up in a larger size so that you can read it. (but don’t forget to click ‘back’ in your browser so that you come back here to continue reading).
I know that it might look complicated – but it’s really not. I’ve made the lines and instructions in different colours so that it made it easier to follow the instructions.
Once you’ve got your card cut, (12″x 5″) and then scored it in the two places shown, – make the folds. Fold along those two lines ready for making the card:
Now at this point I think I’d recommend that you now make another one exactly the same – but this time in cheaper card or paper – so that you can then cut it up in order to use the sections as templates, or ‘patterns’ to make your paper cuts.
Let’s presume you’ve done that and move on to the next step.
Using the templates(or ‘paper patterns’ which you’ve made), cut the papers which you want to be the front and middle section of the inner parts of the pockets. Remember that if you’ve chosen papers like mine in the photograph above, which have writing on it (or a picture) which you want to be able to read, you’ll have to cut and place the right way round so that the pattern or writing makes sense.
Glue or adhere your papers into place and then flip the whole thing over so that you can’t see those papers anymore.
You’re now going to work on the fronts of the pockets. The outside one, and the inside one.
Using the papers which you cut out using the paper pattern for the pockets, glue the papers in place – again remembering to place the papers the right way round, if they have a ‘right way’.
If you now fold your card along the two score lines, it should look something like this:
or rather . . . nothing like that⇑ because you’ll have used your own card and papers!
Now comes the enjoyable part. Decorations! Yay!! 😀 (I love embellishments, flowers, ribbons, bits, bobs and adornments. Can you tell?)
The metal ‘charm’ on the front of the card is from a range called Santoro, by Dovecraft.
You can put anything you like into the pockets on your cards. In mine, I’ve used tags, but if you wanted to give a gift card for a birthday or Christmas, you could tuck a gift card into the inner pocket for the recipient to find, and maybe a tag on the front stamped up with the word ‘Birthday’ or a sentiment of that style.
You can obviously decorate the pockets in any way you choose, but I’ll show you in the pictures below what I did to this particular card.
Two tags for the front pocket – the biggest one is decorated in paper then stamped with the ‘Just a Note’, and the butterfly. I added a short length of lace, and some paper roses and leaves, and tied the tag with some blue Rayon Ribbon. The little tag was stamped on the front with a double butterfly stamp.
The backs of the tags were decorated with papers and stamps – but, silly me, forgot to take a photograph of the backs of these two tags. tsk tsk.
Opening the card . . .
I chose some vintage looking roses paper for the inside left hand side of the card and decorated it with a small paper doily (distressed and stained with some ink), to which I added some mulberry paper flowers, leaves and a miniature post card cut from a pad of similar types of paper embellishments. I added a rayon ribbon bow and around the very edges of the flowers I dragged a fine nibbed glue pen and sprinkled it with a little glitter dust, which brought the ‘view’ to life.
Finally, I added a twinkly, sparkly dragonfly (lowest corner of the post card) and a tiny twinkly wings bumble-bee (top right corner of the post card).
On the inside pocket, I simply adorned the pocket with a mulberry flower (and leaves) and turned my attention instead to decorating the tags inside the pocket.
The two ~‘inside the card’~tags were covered with various papers and then stamped and decorated in a style to suit the ‘feeling’ of the card.
Starting with the larger of these two tags: Using a warm brown ink, I aged the tag edges to give it that ‘old’ feeling. I then attached some vintage lace which I bought in a bag full of off cuts of vintage lace, from Ebay, about five years ago (and I’m still using them now. There were THAT many different bits! Such a lucky find). I added some of the beautiful blue rayon ribbon to cover the edges of the lace, and to that I used Pinflair glue gel to stick a short length of a double row of string of pearls, along the centre of the ribbon, and then tied a double bow with a short length of the same rayon ribbon and glued it in place.
I adhered some mulberry flowers and leaves and added pale cream, pearl flat-back centres, then finally added a little blue resin swallow bird, in flight.
The little tag: I simply stamped a butterfly on the front, and gently distressed around the edges, to give it that vintage feel.
The reverse of the tags:
. . . . finally the back … and as I always say to everyone – ALWAYS sign your artwork . . .
. . . can’t read it? . . . here y’ go:
It was, indeed, “Hand made by Cobwebs”.
This type of card is just so versatile. It suits all styles of cards and all colours. You can dress it up or dress it down. All you need to do is change the tags, and you have a card suitable for almost any occasion.
I think I might make another card using this design – but this time for something totally different – so that you have something to compare it with for versatility.
Thank you so much for coming to visit me and my blog. I appreciate your visit more than you can imagine. It means the world to me – so a big THANK YOU – just as the card says.
Have a trouble-free Thursday, and, in the words of Sergeant Stan Jablonski from Hill Street Blues: “Let’s do it to them before they do it to us!”.
Let’s be careful out there, – my blogger friends. (I’m really ‘dating’ myself now, aren’t I?! LOL)
On reading one of the blogs I follow, I found out that one the writers of a blog, who had been MIA (Missing In Action) for a couple of weeks, had a very good reason for being away from her computer: She’d had a baby! A beautiful, baby girl! After congratulations had been said I thought that it would be a lovely thing to make a baby card for the mommy and her new bundle of love and scrumptiousness, so I sat at my desk and gave it a bit of thought.
The first thought I came up with was that if I was going to make a card for a new baby girl, then to be totally fair, I should also make one for a little boy too. So here I am again, sharing (this time) two cards for the price of one!
I decided on Beatrix Potter – Beatrix holds a big place in my heart – so made two very different cards, but around the same ‘theme’.
Firstly – Just arrived – On platform 1:A New Baby Boy.
Made on a 6″x6″ white, pre-scored & folded card by Papermania. I love their cardstock – 300gsm weight – so it will take practically anything you ask it to. The backing paper is from a range of Beatrix Potter papers & toppers which I actually got free with a magazine over a year ago, and hadn’t used at all (I think, because I loved them so much, I wanted to keep them!) When I went through the papers I fell instantly in love with this backing paper and knew it was going to be the basis of the New Baby Boy card.
The Gingham Check card which I used to mat and layer behind the Hunca Munca, cradling her baby, topper, is from a range by Anna Marie Designs.
I added the fabulous ‘New Baby‘ duckling tag and then chose some ribbon to match the card. In the photographs the ribbon for some reason looks lighter than it is in real life. I think it’s possibly the way the flash on the camera caught the satin of the ribbon and washed out the colour a little. Little blue bow applied to the top left hand corner. I then added a strip along the bottom of the card of Potter paper ribbon, and then resting just along the top of that I added a blue blossom twig (again by Anna Marie Designs) to represent a branch, to which I knew I wanted to add a little metal, antiqued bird house (which has a baby bird perched up on the roof – which you sadly can’t quite see properly in the photo).
The bird house has a hanging loop on top which was too ‘tough’ for me to snip off with my jewellery tools, so I added a tiny bit of ribbon through the loop and tucked the ends under the New Baby topper, gluing them in place with a dab of Anita’s all-purpose.
Of course – me being me, I had to take the decoration into the inside of the card….
I added a pale blue insert to which I added a matching blue ribbon at the top of the page, and at the bottom I added a tiny topper which had daisies, grass and leaves on it, and it just finished off the card nicely.
~ ~ ~ Just arrived on Platform 2: ~ ~ ~
A Gorgeous Baby Girl
The new baby girl who began my thought of making a baby card was born on the 9th July 2014 and her name is Alea Francesca. (You’ll find a link to the momma’s blog at the bottom of the page).
Because I had Alea in mind, I felt as if I ‘knew’ who I was making this card for and …. well I just went to town on the whole girliness!
Again made on a 6″x6″ 300gsm card, by Papermania. To which I added a 6×6″ piece of pink with white polka dots card (by Anna Marie Designs). I added a small paper doily (Dovecraft) – which I actually stuck to the card with foam tape, as I wanted it to be raised slightly from the card so that I could add flowers which where kind of tucked under the doily.
I’d already chosen the topper that I wanted to use – Mrs. Rabbit and her baby bunnies – but I wanted to give it a little more importance – so chose a frame from a selection by Trimcraft (their Santoro range). I cut some pink, gingham check card (Anna Marie Designs) to fit the back of the frame exactly, and mounted the topper onto that then fixed it to the frame using Anita’s all-purpose glue.
The addition of the ‘Congratulations’ gave the card it’s sentiment.
Then it was time to fix some flowers. All the flowers you see are all paper flowers. I’ve had them all for . . . – ohhh, yonks! I use paper flowers all the time so used to buy a pack of them every time I did any crafty shopping, consequently I don’t currently have to ever buy any – and probably won’t for a while! But paper flowers are pretty much generic so any you have would likely work if you’re hoping to make a card ‘like’ this one for yourself.
To the bigger flowers I added a button for a centre and sprinkled a tiny amount of glitter dust so that it would stick to the glue which popped up through the button holes. To the smaller Blossom flowers which had no ‘centre’, I added a teeny flat-back pearl in a colour which matched or complimented the colour of the flower (flat back pearls by Anita’s – the Gemstone Pearl Wheel). Other blossoms came with their own stamen centre.
The pink and white popcorn type of flowers(look above the Congratulations topper – just above the blossoms there) are by Anna Marie Designs.
Then came the butterflies. With all those flowers there just HAD to be butterflies!
I’ve had a big bag of plain coloured butterflies in my stash for about 8 years and never used even one of them. I don’t know where I got them from or why, and I actually put them in a box to go to the charity shop, along with a few other crafty things which I wasn’t using. However, I got them back out again because I wanted paper butterflies for this card. So I chose colours and sizes and then stamped a butterfly on top of the card shape in order to give them the correct butterfly markings. I creased and folded them a little to give them ‘flight’, and then used Anita’s 3D Clear Gloss to give them all a glossy coating – as if I’d clear embossed them a couple of times (only without the pitting which you can sometimes get by doing that).
I couldn’t catch this glossy coating properly in a photograph. I either got ‘white out’ – where you couldn’t see the butterfly at all, or nothing. So you’ll just have to imagine a photo of the whole card showing the butterflies with their glossy shine! But I did manage a ‘montage’ of the butterflies from the gazillion I took while I was trying to capture one whole ‘good’ photo – so this montage kind of shows that the butterflies did have this lovely glossy accent.
The addition of some really lovely warm, rosy pink ribbon and a little antiqued, metal bird house completed the front of the card.
Inside … I just simply added one tiny thing …
… a silver star, right at the top of the pink insert. Is it because the new baby is a star? Is it a wish star? It’s a star which will have meaning to the new mummy and daddy – and to the baby as she grows up and looks back over her baby cards.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, are the two arrivals at Platforms 1 and 2, today. Not by train, you understand. No no. As is the tradition in all new babies, they came by Stork – naturally! 😀
Thank you so much for reading, looking and for visiting, but before you stop reading: can I just please just give you a link to the blog I referred to up in my post above – so that you can see the wonderful new life which is the little girl who started off my thinking of Baby Cards.
Please click to visit the blog and … if you can … leave a comment of congratulations for the new mommy. After all – we all love acknowledgements on something we’ve done which we’ve worked on,and I can think of no finer thing in life than a new baby, which someone has worked extremely hard on producing (and then some!) and can think of no better thing on which to receive congratulations.
Thank you SO much for taking the time out of your day to come and visit. I cannot tell you how much I appreciate your kindness, your support and your friendship. For those of you who follow me – thank you. For those who don’t but are visiting: Click to ‘Follow Me’! What have you got to lose? You won’t be sent loads of rubbish or spam. You’ll just get an email to let you know when I’ve made a post on my blog so that you don’t miss amything. No spam. Nothing which asks you your date of birth or even your location! All you have to do is put your email address into the space provided so that the system knows who to send the email to.
The Art of Cobwebs 