I realize Easter is already over, but I forgot to post this – as well as my other Easter card, which I will post next. After all, it’s the thought that counts – and you can use these techniques of layering and adding a small booklet to the front, as inspiration for your own cards. For any occasion you can think of! 🙂
Papers used: Easter Greetings collection by Craft and You.
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?
Stamperia have come out with some gorgeous vintage and steampunk paper collections. I’ve been working with four of those collections for my latest mini album, which I’ll be showcasing here soon.😃
In the meantime I’ll be showing you some smaller projects I’ve been working on with said papers.
Take this cutie. Since I love to send a friend some tea – kind of a hug-in-a-mug – I created this lovely little Tea Booklet. For its front, back & spine I made use of a pre-imaged paper sheet Stamperia provided in their Lady Vagabond collection.
I matted the inside of the booklet with some beautiful patterns and decorated with some fussy-cut elements.
My spine was 5/8″ (1.5 cm) wide to accomodate a bag of fresh tea. You can make the spine as wide or as narrow as you need. The narrower the spine, the easier it fits into a normal envelope. However, if like me you’d like to send out some tea, you’ll need a little width.
Have you ever created a tea card? I’d love to know you ideas!
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.
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
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
6. Marbled Distress Paint on black card
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.
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 🙂
Every time I finish a craft project, I have design papers left over. Doesn’t matter whether it was a large mini album, or just a card; always there are sheets of loveliness I have to decide on what to do with them. Will I have to throw them out, of can I come up with yet another idea?
Fortunately as crafters we can always create something else with these extra papers, sometimes ending up with more than one bonus project.
A few weeks ago I created quite an elaborate desconstructed envelope card from 3 sheets of design paper + a cutapart sheet. But even after such a large card, I managed to squeeze out three extra cards from the paper pieces I had leftover!
So, hopefully I can inspire you with these ideas, to do the same and make use of every inch of paper real estate you can manage 🙂
Enjoy the video, happy crafting!
This year I sent three Easter cards to friends and family. The first two I already shared in one of my previous posts. This week I’m sharing the third, which is a wallet card, or a tea bag holder card, or whatever other creative descriptive you can come up with 🙂
Also, I shopped my stash again, one of this year’s themes for me personally, in order to actually use up the forgotten-but-beautiful-nonetheless papers in my collection.
It turned out pretty lovely, and of course I filled it up with some fresh tea, as is my way – because I just love to send my friends a Hug-in-a-Mug!
Anyway, here’s the video – ask any questions or leave a remark in the comment section below!
Springtime! And at the moment (for as long as it lasts) I’m loving all of those bright pastels! This year I’m sending out three Easter cards, two of which I’m showing you this week.
I used Mintay’s perfect springtime collection, Better Times. Gosh, those images are like frameable paintings all by themseleves, but I got over those qualms and cut into them anyway 😱
I focussed on designing one large, luxurious card with three sheets of double-sided design paper plus a cutapart sheet. I think I succeeded quite nicely 😊
In the end I still had enough paper left over to create a bonus card, which I’m sharing towards the end of the video.
Wishing you all a very lovely Easter and a happy spring! I’m curious, are you sending any Easter cards this year? Let me know in the comments!
Recently I tried a pop-up die, which effectively cuts a piece of paper that you can then turn into an actual pop-up mechanism.
The video turned into a complete tutorial on how to do all the folds and where to glue, perfect for anyone who has purchased (or owns a similar-looking one to) this die and doesn’t know how it works.
In fact, I’m showing you how to turn this strange-looking diecut into a pop-up mechanism no less than three times. Practice makes perfect! 🙂
I’m sure several brands may offer such a die, though I don’t know of any yet, but AliExpress is of course very very affordable: even when including worldwide shipping it’s still many times more affordable than the same item in Europe. So if you like it, it’s worth a try – you’ll find the link to the shop in the description box of my Youtube video. (And I’m saying this without being sponsored in any way).
So check out the tutorial and let me know if you have ever encountered such a strange-looking die before! 🙂
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.
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.
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.
Enjoy the video, feel free to craft along! 🙂
Sometimes, when I order some of my card designs printed, the printing company adds one or two blanks. These are sturdy, completely white cards; they are also coated, for it is a form of photo paper. So it won’t react to mixed media like your usual assortment of craft papers.
I have created a card with such a blank before, using it as an easy base for design paper. You can check out my step-by-step video on that here.
This time however I decided to try out some mixed media techniques to create a card from one of these coated blank photo paper cards. Here’s what I did, and how it worked out.
1. Stamp and color an image
I chose StazOn ink for this, because that is suited especially for smooth, non-porous surfaces – like photo paper. I also colored the stamped image, using Tim Holtz Distress Markers.
In hindsight, that turned out not to be the best combination, for the StazOn ink reacted a little bit to the Distress Markers. So, my tip here is: IF you want to use water-based markers to color your image, then do NOT use an alcohol-based ink to stamp, but an oil-based ink like Archival Ink.
2. Seal your image
If you’re going to spray a background, you’ll need to seal your colored image first, otherwise it will either run and wick, or it will be covered up by your sprays (depending on the mediums you choose).
I wanted to use Distress Spray Stains, which are water-based, and since I already used Distress Markers to color the image, I knew exactly how to seal it: with Distress Micro Glaze.
Simply dab your finger lightly in the jar, and rub it all over the colored image.
Side note: of course there are several other products on the market to seal your image. For instance, transparent gesso, or mod podge, to name a few. I’m simply mentioning the one I used. #nonspon
3. Spray your inks
Spray your entire card to your heart’s desire. Then remove all of the sprayed inks from your stamped image with a paper towel. Thanks to the Micro Glaze, none of the sprays will stick and will come off easily, without messing up the colors of your image.
Also, because my paper was coated, it didn’t really absorb the inks too well; there were several spots where the ink didn’t take, causing a great bonus effect!
4. Add special effects
I added some transparent medium to create a bit of a glass effect for the glasses: I used Nuvo Crystal Drops for this, but you could use several alternatives, like Glossy Accents, Paper Glaze or any other dimensional transparent medium.
5. Add a sentiment
Last but not least, I stamped a sentiment – this time with Archival Ink (having learned my lesson from step 1).
Alternatively, you could also go dimensional and use wooden or chipboard sentiment pieces.
And done!
Have you ever crafted with coated paper like this? Feel free to ask any questions, or to let me know what you think, below in the comment section!
