Author Archives: CraftKatie

Perpetual Calendar pt. 3 – Place in Time

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Back in January of this year I shared the first six months of my new 12×12″ perpetual calendar. Well, I’m glad to be able to share the entire calendar with you today, all 12 months!

I’m actually creating TWO of this type of layout calendar, one for my mom and one for myself. I’ll share them both, in four parts:

So here’s part 3, created with Graphic 45’s beautiful Place in Time collection, which I truly enjoyed working with, so enjoy the video and the photos below!

 

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Time to Celebrate Cards & Paper Walkthrough

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I love the gorgeous spring greens and salmon pinks of Graphic 45’s Time to Celebrate!
That is why today I’m sharing two cards I created with it, after walking you through the papers and embellishments of this collection.

It is the perfect card making stack!
Because several sheets display more than one festive occasion at once, coming up with projects that are not cards turns out to be a bit of a challenge for me though, for I usually have one specific occasion or purpose in mind. But, that’s a puzzle I’ll (very happily) solve at a later time!

For now I’m very happy to say: enjoy the video and the pictures below! 🙂

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Video Tutorial: Gatefold Card

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A while ago I created a little gatefold card after which I received some requests for a tutorial. I’m happy to share that I’ve now finished such a tutorial and I’m sharing it with you all today! 🙂

For some extra inspiration I’m also sharing some photos of another one of these cards at the end of this post, below the video.

So have fun creating, and stay crafty! 🙂

A third example, for some extra inspiration 😉

A journaling tag hanging from a brad, instead of a tuck spot with several small tags.

No pocket on the back; instead, an embossed scrap mat.

On the front a dimensional sticker from the paper collection, instead of a flower.

Have fun crafting! 🙂

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Layered Card with Once Upon a Springtime

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Using some leftover pieces from my few Graphic 45’s Once Upon a Springtime sheets, I created this layered card for my aunt’s birthday.

This gorgeous paper is great to work with! Its base layer is what I call a scrap mat, i.e. a mat created from scraps of paper. If you wish to try this technique for yourself, feel free to check out my (free) video tutorial!

Other techniques I used were fussy-cutting, layering, matting, and stamping. I also used some liquid pearl around the edges of the journaling part on the inside of the card. And last but not least, I’m showing off my new 1½” butterfly punch and my new Yep, I made this stamp. 🙂

Hope you feel inspired to create a gorgeous card with relatively few materials too! 🙂

Enjoy the video, and your weekend; stay crafty!

 

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Springtime Dreams Keepsake Album Deluxe

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When I first created my Butterflies & Stars Keepsake Album Deluxe back in the fall of 2013, I had no idea it would become quite the scrapbooking hit on Youtube – as per today, it has gotten nearly 460,000 views and the number is still growing! Wow!

Unfortunately I have no explanation for this, since I have not been able to repeat these results… Its sister albums Flora & Fauna, Fairytale Treasures and Country Garden all had their shares of views, and so did my other projects, but none of them ever came anywhere near that unique number. I guess Youtube moves in mysterious ways… Oh well…

Anyway, I received (and am still receiving) a lot of requests for a tutorial on this type of album, this ‘double-spined’ gatefold-like type of album that I’ve dubbed Keepsake Album Deluxe.

And I have some great news for all of those lovely people: I’ve now been able to create this tutorial, and it is huge! It sports 132 pages with 418 pictures!
And it’s available to you now as a digital download in my Etsy shop.

To write a tutorial I of course had to create the project, for I had to take pictures of every step of the process. So here’s the latest edition of my Keepsake Album Deluxe, created using Webster’s Pages’ Nest collection, and I’m calling it Springtime Dreams. 🙂

Enjoy the video and let me know what you think! 

 

Want to know what other people created with the tutorial? Check out the fanpage and see for yourself! 🙂

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Awesomeness: 1-sheet Interactive Card!

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Sometimes you want to send someone an awesome card, but you don’t have the time to spend hours and hours of creating. That is why I love my quick scrap projects!

I designed this card from only 1 sheet of doublesided 12×12″ (30,5×30,5 cm) design paper, with just a couple of folds and cuts. I also added some cardstock for the tags, and a few little embellishments. This design helps you to create a luxurious, interactive card within less than 60 minutes of creating!

It also enables you to use up those single sheets of double-sided design paper you might still have left over from other projects.

Or, in my case, the design lets me indulge myself in just buying single sheets that really stand out from their collections, without having to buy the entire collections and all that goes with them 🙂

To help you all along I wrote a tutorial for you, which you can acquire for a very sharp price in my Etsy shop 🙂

Enjoy the video and pictures below, and stay crafty!

 

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Playing with Oxford: Two Magnetized Cards

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One cannot have too many Happy Birthday cards in stock, can one? 🙂 For the two magnetized cards I’m sharing with you today, I worked with Basic Grey’s Oxford paper collection again, the first taste of which I got when I created my recent group card fold-out.

The first card is a gatefold, with clean lines and a warm color palette. I used a Hip Hip Hooray seal stamp on a piece of designpaper, then fussy-cut around it and backed it  up with some cardstock for sturdiness.

To pop it up, I used dimensional tape on the Hooray seal.

I matted the back of the card as well, for a consistend look & feel.

When you open the card, there’s a pocket in the middle that holds a tag. The tag shows the personalized birthday wishes, which I printed on the design paper before I matted.

I punched the border of the pocket with an awesome punch by Martha Stewart, the punch-around-the-page Party edge punch. It shows different little presents and a cute little birthday hat. Though I bought this punch as an afterthought when it was on clearance, I have absolutely fallen in love with it since!

 

The second card is a double card with a magnetized closure. It’s still masculine but some of the colors I chose are more vibrant than the first, although both are from the Oxford paper collection.

You can find a free tutorial for this type of card in my blog post on the City Lights card. You’ll only have to adjust the measurements of the card to your liking. My card below is 5⅛ x 5⅛ (13 x 13 cm). I stamped Happy Birthday onto the magnetized closure; this is a great stamp by Stampendous, I’ve used it before – on my City Lights card – and will use it again because I love it!

The inside of the card shows the personalized birthday message, which I printed on a piece of design paper.

To add a little bit of interest I popped up the birthday message with some dimensional tape.

The closure piece is attached to the card with two screw brads, which is one of my favorite embellishments to use on a card for a guy, for they really look like screws! 🙂

 

Hope you enjoyed this post and got some inspiration from it – for not every card has to be filled with complex layering and a lot of embellishments to still be awesome, right. So go ahead and take advantage of your spring or summer holidays to make a stash of gorgeous, magnetized cards for your peeps! 🙂

I’m off to enjoy Pentecost, which in the Netherlands always has a second day, so tomorrow (Monday) I won’t have to go to work for a change, woohoo! 🙂

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Four-fold Photo Board “Baby’s First Year” (+ 2 cards)

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Hello all!

Today I’m sharing with you a new design, that I’ve dubbed a four-fold photo board! To celebrate the birth of her niece’s baby girl, my mother asked me to create something special and this is what I came up with.

This photo board combines the concepts of a gameboard-like, easy to stow away photo keepsake and an elaborate quadruple layout piece to showcase your photos and memorabilia in one great overview. This could be a great conversation piece at your table 🙂

It’s perfect for housing one year of pictures, for it is aimed at showcasing twelve picture highlights, one for each month. Hence the theme I chose: Baby’s First Year. There is room for some extra photos though.

The four-fold photo board would also be perfect for many other themes! I can picture a family’s history, adding a family tree to one quarter of the board, and using the other three for pictures of your father, your mother and your children (or yourself). Other themes that I could see fitting this design very well: the four seasons, baby-to-bride, puppy to senior dog (or other pet), modelling portfolio, career highlights, holidays, travel, etc. Gosh, so many ideas now I think of it! 🙂

There’s a tutorial waiting for you in my Etsy shop 🙂 . There are also some kits available: Bundle of Joy Boy by Echo Park, which is the boy version of my own project, and Heirloom by Kaisercraft, which has an ancestry theme. You can find them in my Kits section.

Anyway, it was great fun to create this project – I even created two cards from the leftover papers – and I hope you’ll enjoy it too! 🙂

 

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Mother’s Day and Happy Birthday with G45’s Time to Flourish

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I’ve been working with Graphic 45’s Time to Flourish collection since the end of last year, when I was creating the first six months of an 8×8″ calendar. (I’ll show you the second half of that calendar this summer, since I haven’t finished it yet.)

Meanwhile, I added some 12×12″ inch Time to Flourish sheets to my otherwise 8×8″ collection, to mix & match a bit and create four nice cards. Today I’m happy to share the first two, centered around the month of May. They were great fun to make, especially with all the cutaparts, tags and chipboard pieces that come with this collection! I also enjoyed playing around with two different sizes of the same May sheet, the results of which you can see in the video.

So here’s two layered cards, one for Mother’s Day, the other for a birthday, both centered around the month of May.
For some more month-based greeting cards, check out my August versions!

Please like & subscribe, and let me know what you think!
(If you click on the title of this blog post you’ll find the comment section underneath the post).

Ancestry Mini Album – with pictures!

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I generally love the wide variety of vintage design paper collections out there, but some really stand out. Like Ancestry, an older collection by K&Company. I enjoyed working with its warm, nostalgic colors and patterns before, when I created my large family tree mini album back in 2013. I also used it to create the cute micro album in a box I showed you earlier this year.

And most recently I decided to give it one last go and use up all of the remaining paper I had left to create one more mini album. So with pleasure I present to you my Ancestry Mini Album – with pictures!
For as a bonus, I added photos to the album to give you an idea of how a scrapbook mini album looks with actual pictures in it! I decided to work with pictures from my own family tree, you know, the really old black & white ones, hidden treasures dugg up from my parents’ old family albums.

So enjoy the video and don’t forget to like & subscribe! 🙂

If you’d like to create this album yourself, I recommend the tutorial for my Life’s a Picnic mini album. There are some minor differences in page design and album closure but its basic design is quite similar. If you’d like to do an ancestry themed album, there’s one more Heirloom kit available in my shop!

You can check out the video for the Life’s a Picnic album here, in case you’re considering to buy the tutorial. And for another variation on this design – to give you some inspiration – you can check out my Christmas mini album too.

 

 

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Group Card Fold-Out for a Guy

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This coming week we’re saying goodbye to our – now former – boss, thanking him with a gift and of course an accompanying card with our well-wishes. I offered to create a card instead of one us running to the first available store for a relatively random Thank You card. Fortunately for me, my colleagues agreed! 🙂

Since there are seven of us the card had to offer enough real estate for seven personal messages. Also, since I offered this quite impulsively, I only had one night left to create it, so the design had to be relatively simple. And last but not least, our former boss is a man, so the card had to have a masculine feel.

So here’s what I came up with. This magnetic fold-out card is easy to make and offers room for seven personal messages. I used the Oxford paper collection by Basic Grey, which I feel is a mostly masculine paper line. Since I could not use any of the girly stuff I love so much (no roses, no butterflies, no bows and ribbons!) I let the paper speak for itself. The only embellishment I allowed was a magnetic closure with a ribbon pull – which yes, was a ribbon, but which I felt was okay since it was black…

Anyway, here’s the video – hope it inspires you! Oh, and this card would also make a great mini album insert by the way, so even more possibilities!
If you’d like a tutorial for this design, please let me know in the comment section below (click on the title of this post if you don’t see one) or leave me a Tweet!

Enjoy!

Three tips on creating layered card layouts

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Lately I’ve been practising my layering, on two calendars which are still a work in progress, but mainly on some birthday cards. I already did a video tutorial on one way you could layer a card, back in August 2014.

This week I’m sharing some extra tips with you, illustrated by three of my latest birthday cards. The paper line I’ve used for all three of them is Lucille, a paper line by Basic Grey which some of you may recognize from my Life’s a Picnic mini album (tutorial available!), of which I had some paper left over, enough to create these cards – though I had to make use of all three of the techniques I’m sharing with your below, otherwise I wouldn’t have had enough paper after all.

Tip 1 – Use scrap mats – even when die-cutting


Above: Birthday stamp by Kaisercraft

I’m guessing I’ve mentioned my scrap mats (check out my free video tutorial by clicking this link) in almost every one of my projects by now – what can I say, I’m a sucker for squeezing out the absolute maximum of paper real estate out of my paper collections 🙂

So in the pictures you can see that the second layer on this card (counting from the bottum up) is in fact a scrap mat, decorated with punched corners. An extra tip however, is that you can die cut shapes from your scrap mats as well! Check out the second to last layer (counting from the bottom up), i.e. the layer directly below the stamped sentiment label: that is a scrap mat label!

Another use for this, next to creating labels and tags, is die cutting flowers and other decorative shapes. I used this technique in the Life’s a picnic mini album, here’s an example: in the picture below you can see that every layer of the flower consists of two different pieces of design paper.

 

Tip 2 – Use the paper pad’s cover

Many design paper pads have covers that have at least some imagery, patterns or shapes that are very useable for fussy cutting. So even if you have hardly any design paper left, you can still embellish your project with help from the paper pad’s cover.

The Lucille 6×6″ paper pad cover has a floral image that I fussy cut and used as a decorative element on my card.

 

 

Tip 3 – Use dimension

If you have die cut two labels in incrementing sizes (my largest label in this third card had been die cut from a scrap mat by the way – see Tip 1), you could of course simply layer them flatly on top of eachother. You can add some interest however by using some double-sided foam tape to adhere the smaller label to the larger.

Adding some glitter glue along the top layer’s edges is always a good idea as well!

 

I’m finding this dimension thing very exciting by the way, and I’m always trying to add some of it to my layered cards & layouts. Like in the Time to Flourish calendar below:

Leave some tips for me!

These were my tips, for now! If my layering adventures lead to any other need-to-know tidbits of knowledge on layering, I’ll let you know! 🙂

Also, if you have any layering tips for me, please let me know and leave a comment – or tweet me!

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