Today I’m sharing a birthday card with Stamperia’s lovely vintage Time is an Illusion collection. There’ll be some more cards the coming days, for I – finally! – finished the new mini album (mini tome, rather 😅) using four of Stamperia’s vintage collections. And as per usual I’m using the leftovers to create all kinds of nice cards and booklets.
This one is in fact a pretty simple card to make: you only have to decorate the front, and you only need three pieces of design paper to layer. Decorate any way you like. Done.
For instance, I used some dimensional tape between the layers of design paper to achieve a 3D effect. I also put some Tim Holtz Distress Grit Paste through a flourished stencil, and colored it with Distress Embossing Glaze – which also adds some nice shine & gloss.
Do you like Stamperia papers? What is your favorite collection?
Tip: You don’t always need to create a full-blown birthday card, a nice tag will go a long way too – especially when added to a gift to carry your birthday wishes.
Here’s an easy little gift tag and the steps to create it. I designed it to go with some birthday flowers for a friend.
I chose a cutapart from Stamperia’s Time is an Illusion collection;
Layered a second cutapart on top;
stamped some butterflies;
added a ribbon on top;
added a Tim Holtz quote chip, after using some Distress Mica Sprays to grunge it up a bit.
I tend to compartimentalize my mixed media crafting: one day I do my spraying, inking and/or painting, one day I use my stamps, stencils & texture pastes, and lastly I turn it into a card or tag to send out or give away. This not only keeps it fun and practical, it also saves time when you actually need a quick card or tag.
Stash of art backgrounds
In this post I’m sharing several of these follow-up projects, starting with the finished background, followed by the final project. You can find the making of some of these backgrounds in previous blog posts btw, should you be interested.
1. Birthday tag
Just the art backgroundAll dolled-up
2. Textured birthday tag
3. Alcohol ink on gesso birthday card
4. Black background cards
5. Printed close-up photo of above art project, matted on cardstock
Crafting a paper project is one thing, but feeling confident about actually designing it, that’s quite another. You cannot teach creativity, but what I can do is taking you along in my thought process while I design a special kind of card.
Using a sheet of Mintay’s Next Trip collection, I’m designing a card with a spine, meant to hold a hand-made tea bag filled with delicious tea.
Mintay Papers – Next Trip – MT-NEX-03
You can watch me come up with measurements – while I explain all kinds of different design options – where to cut and fold, and how to get the most out of your one sheet of design paper. You will also see me design an actual belly bridge, vs. the more common belly band :-), one which is able to accomodate quite a bulky tea bag.
In the video I’m also using a tea bag die, but you can of course also cut and fold your own little tea bag. If you don’t know how to do that, there’s a complete instruction on how to replicate this particular one, including measurements, in my Tea Bag Micro Album tutorial.
Hope this is helpful to you, let me know in the comments!
PS: I’m not creating as many projects as I used to, it’s just a phase I’m guessing. This past 1.5 year has beaten my creativity down somewhat. I’ll still be here though, and on Youtube. Just not every single week. Sorry! 😔
To my Dutch followers: if you want to see what I’ve been up to lately, check out my second YT channel, which is entirely in Dutch, and my second IG account (English) 🙂
It doesn’t always have to take many long hours of work to create a beautiful card. In this week’s tutorial I’m sharing an idea for a quick & easy card design, for which you only need some pieces of paper, a piece of string and some tools.
You can use colored cardstock, design paper or a mixed media background to be the showstopper piece. I created my backgrounds with Distress inks by Tim Holtz.
A nice detail of this design is the piece of string, which you wrap around your card and tie into a bow on the inside of your card.
All in all I think you may actually create this card in under ten minutes – provided you already made your mixed media backgrounds at some time in the past, and have them at the ready (if you’re not opting for design paper or colored cardstock).
If you don’t have a die-cutting machine, you could also stamp a sentiment, or adhere a chipboard piece like in the picture below. In case you don’t own an embossing machine, you can easily skip the embossed layer entirely, also like the card below (shown in more detail in the video).
Enjoy the video tutorial! – which is, like this card design, short & sweet 🙂
I have great admiration for design paper companies and their graphic designers: having to come up with unique, lovely and most of all sellable designs several times a year seems like a sheer insurmountable challenge to me. So I can understand that every once in a while some design paper collection comes out on the market that in itself looks great – stunning even – but has a slightly odd theme.
This week I’m sharing what you could do with such fairly non-practical themes; like the pastry-themed Sweety collection by Stamperia.
Lovely colors and beautiful graphic designs – they look so good I want to eat them all!
Other than making me seriously crave some chocolate & cherry pie topped off with some pistachio mint ice cream (yummie!) I’m not sure what to do with this collection, except admire its visual gorgeousness. Yes, I know, the theme is great for birthdays and other parties, but then I would prefer a 6×6″ size for cards and Stamperia doesn’t do those. Now take the 12×12 inch sheets: these elaborate graphic designs look more like a picture you would frame and hang from your wall, than cut it up (how?!) to make it into, say, a mini album or, even more difficult, a card.
A seriously uncuttable 12×12″ sheet
So, here’s what I do whenever I encounter a collection I love but cannot for the life of me think of a project intended for some actual, practical use: I buy only the cutapart sheet, and design one card around it, preferably while using up the entire sheet.
The Stamperia cutapart sheets are always great, plus, they come with beautiful journalling spots on the back. Perfect.
So, here’s a short video tutorial on how to design a card around your specific cutaparts. If your cutapart sheet has differently sized cutaparts, then here’s a tutorial around a second design.
This week I wanted to show you how to create a mixed media card, using inks, grit paste and embossing glaze. So, I set out and created one on camera – or so I thought… As it turns out, my camera wasn’t recording at all during most of the proces! 🤬
So I started over and did another one, with the camera actually rolling this time.
Step-by-stepproces
Card 1 – This is the one I intended to film but didn’t. I painted a background in three shades of purple. Added ink through both stamping and stencilling, then took a second stencil and added a translucent texture paste (in this case Ranger’s Distress Grit Paste). Then I colored the grit paste while it was still wet, by covering it with a transparent embossing powder (in this case Ranger’s Distress Embossing Glaze). When the grit paste had dried, I heat-embossed it to melt the Glaze. Heat-embossing is a great way to color your texture pastes btw. You can check out one of my previous posts to see more of that technique.
Card 2 – same steps but with different colors. (This is the one I actually create in the video.) Some small differences: I used some ink sprays (from Ranger’s Dylusions line) instead of paint to color the background, and I used two colors of Embossing Glaze instead of just one. I also finished it as an actual card, so I added a decorative die-cut and a chipboard sentiment and sent it off as a birthday card 🎉.
Enjoy the process video, hope you’ll find it helpful!
A wallet card is a great category of cards if you want to send out something more elaborate and interactive than the regular single card or folded card. I’ve designed several versions of wallet cards, among which this type, which has two deep pockets, a flap and a belly band. You can add tags with sentiments, pictures and one time I even sent out a small bag of flower seeds in one of the pockets.
They are of course suitable for any occasion and you can choose your papers accordingly. This week I’m sharing a birthday version in bright and happy summer colors. For decoration I added several die-cuts, stamping, fussy-cutting, Stickles (glitter glue), enamel dots, washi tape and even some heat embossing. The inside flap has a punched border with cute birthday presents – thanks to a great Martha Stewart punch. The back flap sports a tiny orange umbrella brad that in itself has nothing to do with birthdays but that I simply fell in love with. In the pockets I tucked two large tags on which I printed some fun birthday sentiments.
All in all quite an elaborate card full of nice little nooks and crannies – and still relatively flat, so easy to send out in an envelope.
Hope to have inspired you to create some wallet cards of your own! And if you want to make this particular one, simply go check out my tutorial!
Have a great week, enjoy the weather and celebrate the eased lockdowns everywhere.
Papers used: 2 sheets from the double-sided Birthday Bash collection by Pink Paislee:
The other day I bought new bed linens – very colorful ones of course, as I generally tend to feel attracted to colorful things. They were packaged in plastic with a cardboard wrapper which displayed a picture of what the linens would look like once unpacked. And it was that cardboard picture I used to create this card!
The colors were simply amazing and I embellished only a little here and there. Did have to mat the inside and backside of the card of course, and for this I used some Studio Light papers.
In the video you can see the actual linens by the way 🙂
So anyway, this week my tip is to look beyond your design paper pads and check out other options – like cardboard wrappers of bed linens 🙂
Sometimes it’s nice to be able to send some great pictures of you and your friend along with a birthday card for said friend. This card design is perfect for showcasing 2-4 pictures, together with a nice birthday wish!
It’s based on my wallet card design that’s explained in tutorial #22, so check that out of you’d like to create it yourself. It’s easy and fun!
This time I worked with Bo Bunny’s Rose Cafe collection, to coordinate with the color scheme automatically dictated by the pictures that I used 🙂
This week’s tip is about how to best utilize that cut-apart sheet you have lying around – for instance when you’ve used up most of your papers but can’t bring yourself to throw out that one last sheet. Here’s the good news: you don’t have to! (ever! I promise).
Instead, cut it apart into all its bits & pieces, combine these with some simple-patterned coordinating papers and get your Layering on 🙂
Extra bonus tip: enlarge your paper real estate by making my so-called scrap mats – just check out the free tutorial below the first video!
What birthday card to make for that soccer-loving friend or relative? How about a soccer-themed card, decorated with a custom-printed birthday wish, a Johan Cruijff tag and a wooden letter ‘K’ for his first name. With Stickles, of course.
This time the video contains a super short overview. More details in the pictures below 🙂
