Birthday Card

My first plan for this card was to paint a picture of our home in Vermont.  I made a start and failed miserably.  Dear One suggested that I paint the mailbox.  So I did.  Sort of.

Just to explain this painting...there is the green mailbox at the end of our driveway.  There are a few bushes at the foot of the mailbox then some grass beside the dirt driveway with more bushes on the other side of the driveway.  The brownish part behind the mailbox is the rocky under-the-pines area that never looked like much. 

For some reason I got souped up about the Cricut Expression we have.  I remembered the Walk in My Garden cartridge we have so I made the wheelbarrow full of flowers.  It was marginally successful.  Even though nowhere near perfect, I loved making the card.  And sent it off in time to be received by the birthday it was intended to acknowledge.

Paper Crafting: Two Birthday Cards

Making cards for boys and men is different.  Making cards for girls and women is easier. At least for me.  It takes much longer to think of what to make.  Here are two from this week.

The first is for a man. This entailed a Gelli print as well as die-cutting and folding.  Oh, and gluing.  I need to learn how to use glue better.  Seriously.  Still, I think the card, well, both of them, are okay.  They are just not good and certainly not great.  Maybe next time.

One of these dies is that one I said I would never use again.  I guess I cannot stand having the die get the better of me, so I tried again.  This one went better...so I will probably try again.  It would be useful to get it right.

This next card is for a ten-year-old grandson.  I hope he likes it.  Kind of hokey and still the wet glue problem...BUT...he is such a sweet agreeable boy that he will probably like it anyway, even with is multiple flaws.

This is the front of the card with ten smiley faces.

This is a pop-up card with the balloon bouquet opening up when he opens the card.  In retrospect I should have made the balloons much larger.  Next time.

April Birthday Card

Splitcoast Stampers has some great card tutorials.  I tried this one.  It goes in the mail today.

 This is the front.

Start opening the card and this is what you get:

This is the card completely popped and without sentiments written in on the blank parts.  You could stamp it but I usually write my own sentiments.

It was really pretty quick and easy.  I did have to even up the edges after all was done as there was a little extra "white" showing on the outside.

It was a satisfying project.

March Birthday Card

This card started out being a pen and ink card to which I planned to add some watercolor.  That is not what I turned out doing.

It is always fun to mat a card and make a matching envelope.  Love those We R Memory Keepers Envelope Punch Boards!!

Second February Birthday Card

It was time for another February birthday card. This one turned out less than I had hoped for, but in the end I sent it anyway.

The paper was some different watercolor paper that I embossed using a lovely embossing folder and the Big Shot.  The embossing went very well and made a very nice impression.  Even though the paper is 140 pound, it is low quality, or maybe it is wood pulp instead of cotton based.

It was fun to play with the water color crayons I purchased after the free watercolor class I took at Michaels a couple of months ago.  Since I did not remember anything the nice teacher told me I basically made a mess of the paper but it is colorful and somewhat hopeful, at least to me so I mounted it pink paper and made a green bird envelope.

Hopefully she will like it.  I love her so if she does not, well, I will just have to make another one until I make a card she likes.

February Birthday Card

We have birthdays in February so I needed to get some cards made.

To tell you where the idea came from, I was watching a Frugal Crafter YouTube video.  She has been using Rubber Stamp Tapestry Peg Stamps for a long time, which successfully sucked me into buying a few!  I do love the few that I have bought from Rubber Stamp Tapestry.  The Frugal Crafter had designed some unmounted rubber stamps for them and made a couple of cards with them.  I liked them so I ordered her stamps and a couple of others.  They arrived on Thursday!

This is the first one I made with those stamps.  Some missionaries,  elders, were in the office after I had made the card (at home but brought to the office to mount).  I asked what they thought of it.  One of them said it was a little strange.  The other one said he liked it. He asked if I had made it so I said yes.  The other one then said if it was homemade, he loved it!  He just would not buy it in the store. He said he loves homemade cards. The other elder then told me that one of the missionaries in our mission has parents who own Stampin' Up!  Oh. My. Goodness!!!  Stampin' Up is the devil!  Can I tell you I have spent way too much money with them?!!! But loved everything!

 

For this card, I made a light green card base, having to change the size multiple times by cutting.  You can see in the upper left corner of this card a tiny bit of green which is actually on a page of Spanish language business I was doing.  I did not notice it until too late to crop.  I think I will put learning to crop on my radar soon....

For myself, I am okay with this card.  I do think I will use actual watercolors and brushes when I do it again.  I do really like the grass, though.  Also,  the tree is rather blurry because I did not have an acrylic block to mount the stamp on after cutting it out. I used a Chinet plate.  Don't do it!  Still, I thought it did give a little depth to the tree.

Watercolor Quick "Primitive" Painting

A friend is having a birthday soon.  Not all my supplies were at hand so I decided to just do a quick little painting and attach it to a card blank.  This is what I managed in the short time I had with the few supplies I had.  Not my best work.  Not my favorite work.  Still, it is somewhat colorful, which is something I like.

Papercrafting: Birthday Card Bound Journal

Years ago when I was working at Dartmouth College I used to attend bookbinding classes at the library before teaching our church youth in the evening. It was so enjoyable to learn many different structures that you can make with very few tools.  Recently I have become acquainted with Sea Lemon on YouTube (don't you just LOVE YouTube?!!) who has a wonderful bookbinding series.  I used her saddle stitch tutorial for this little journal.

Our granddaughter has a birthday coming up.  When I was her age my parents gave me a journal to

write in.  In fact, they gave me a journal every Christmas for years.  I wrote in those journals from time to time.  Looking at them now I am rather appalled at the stuff a young teen girl writes....

Anyway, I thought it would be fun to make a birthday card for this wonderful grandchild who lives too far away.  And then I thought:  why not make her a tiny journal in eight colors.  So I did.

Heavy card stock was printed with a line to make writing easier. (I used the second template on the website that was called "Wide Ruled Lined Paper 8.7 mm"). I then cut the paper in half horizontally and used an awl to punch holes along the spine.  I had previously used binder's clips to hold the pieces of paper tightly and evenly together. I used four sheets twice to make two signatures to bind.  When punching the holes with the awl, I placed the pages face down on a thick telephone book and then punched out the five holes for each signature, and then  I measured the width of the two signatures and then made a spine on the heavy blue dot embossed cover stock.  I used baker's twine to bind with.

It turned out okay.  Not fabulous, but okay.  It is certainly use-able.


Below the two signatures and the lined pages are clearly visible.

 Here you can see the spine of the journal.  One thing I learned when doing the spine is that I should have scored it rather deeply first.  That way there would have been a more firm line rather than ripple-y as it is here.  Next time.

It was also fun to make the envelope. I have decided to make envelopes with the envelope punch board  for all cards in the future.  We R Memory Keepers blog is a good one to visit... The postmistress is very agreeable to pretty envelopes as long as the address is clearly seen.

Papercrafting: Antiqued Card

Making birthday cards is so enjoyable.  This time I tried to make the antiqued look.  I like the card, mostly.

To make this card,  using heavy card stock, cut the card to nearly the finished size.

Choose an embossing folder you like and run the card through your embossing/die cut machine. I used a Big Shot...one of my favorite tools.

Choose an ink pad color you like and more or less smush the ink pad onto the embossing folder.

With a baby wipe, wipe across the parts of the embossed card you want to be ink-free.

This is how mine turned out:

I would like to have gotten the blue on all of the background, but that did not happen this time....

Papercrafting: Cricut Wild Card Cartridge Envelope and Card

On YouTube I found a number of videos using the Cricut Wild Card cartridge.  This is the card and envelope I made:

This was fun to make and came out fairly well.

The card was made using the same textured paper as the tree's trunk.

Papercrafting: Cute Dinosaur Birthday Card

A young dinosaur enthusiast is part of our family.  This is the card I made for him.

This was made using the Cricut cartridge called Boys Will Be Boys.  I cut the designs at 3.25 inches.

Papercrafting: A Cute Birthday Card for a Boy

It is so enjoyable to make cards for family and friends.  AND also sometimes terribly frustrating if they do not work the way I hope they will.  This time I was making a card for a seven-year-old boy.  Because I am not at all creative, I put it out there on YouTube and found this lovely video at Weekend Card.  It was for a cute car.  Since I had inquired recently what the grandson enjoys at this point in his life and he replied that it was cars, I thought this was the card for him.

Vickie, at Weekend Card, very generously made a PDF for free download to go along with her video.  Go to her Clips-n-Cuts webpage for a download.  In the right hand sidebar there is a "What are you looking for?" query box.  Put in "cute car" and it will pop right up for you.

This is the car I made:

The green base for the card (which, of course, opens up so you can insert a message, a check, a long letter to the child to test his reading skills, or whatever else you want to include) was green card stock, or maybe it was cover stock. It was pretty heavy.  The yellow tires were of the same type of paper, and funnily enough, will be the background for another child's car some day.  The striped paper was from a 12-inch stack of lots of interesting papers which I cut down then placed in our inkjet printer with the colored side up---in our printer that is how you have to get it so you can print on the white side of the paper (to make it easy to see the pattern for cutting).  Your printer may be different.  If you need to check which side prints first, open the paper tray, put a little "x" on the bottom (toward you) of the plain paper in the tray on the right hand corner.  Print something on the paper then see where the "x" shows up.  That will let you know how you need to place your figured paper.

You can see that I also made a matching envelope.  I used We R Memory Keepers punch board for the envelope.  This took an 8.5" by 8.5" square to make the right sized envelope.  Sometimes I think that the envelopes give me more of a sense of delight than the cards....  Sometimes.  This card really did it for me!

Papercrafting: A Simple Birthday Card

Several family birthdays are coming up.  Dear One brought up the subject last week.  He wondered what I was going to do for birthday cards. 

This is what I did:  I got out my "punch around the page" punches.  We have two different sets.  They require specific sized squares.  I cut two different 12" by 12" sheets of paper into four 6" by 6" pieces, then cut down one of each pattern into 5" by 5" squares.  Save the 1" strips you cut off.  You will use them in a moment.

To punch around the page you start by punching the corners.  After that then you will insert the paper into the other punch and line up one corner design with the little silver design just to the right of the punch.  Give it a good punch.

Next you slide the paper to the right and line up with the silver design at the end of the punch.  Punch it out.  With a 5" square you have now completed one of the four sides of the paper.  Complete the other three sides.  If you are very precise, the edge design will be just perfect.  If not exactly precise, you might have a tiny sliver of paper sticking up between motifs which you will need to very carefully cut off.

Front of a recent card

When creating the inside of this card, I used the strip of leftover paper.  Cut a small heart out of one end, clip off the curved excess, then glue down the plain strip at the right side of the card then add the heart below the strip.  Add a little note, and mail off the card.