Tag Archives: quick craft project

Three Very Easy Cards, The K.I.S.S. Way

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Leonardo da Vinci once said that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, and often I apply that to my paper craft projects: finding beauty in simple designs, by playing with colors or showcasing design paper.

Or even more down to earth than that, keeping it as simple as I can. This is what in project management is called the KISS principle btw: “Keep it Simple, Stupid”. In other words don’t overthink and don’t make things unnecessarily complicated.

Anyway, today I’m sharing three tips with you to keep your card making as simple as possible, yet still very presentable!

K.I.S.S. Card Tip 1: Purchase a lovely card, and mat it onto a piece of double-sided design paper. Very quick & easy, and it looks great. Plus, the inside of your card automatically looks sophisticated as well, with your paper being double-sided.

K.I.S.S. Card Tip 2: Purchase a lovely card, and add a simple decoration, but nothing elaborate. For instance, you could add only 1 bow or flower, or a couple of bling pieces. Or you can do as I did: I bought a large postcard at a museum (yes, those pastries were counted as art, in the sense that they were part of a photo collection…) and added some glitter glue lettering.

K.I.S.S. Card Tip 3: Mat a piece of design paper onto a white card; print or stamp a sentiment, die-cut a label shape around it and add it to the card. These are especially great when you’re creating for someone who’s not into all of that pinky fluffy stuff 🙂

Hope you enjoyed these tips, they can make your card making life a whole lot easier, while still being able to send nice hand-crafted cards to everyone you care to send one to.

Enjoy your week!

Quick Birthday Tag – Vintage Style!

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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.

  1. I chose a cutapart from Stamperia’s Time is an Illusion collection;
  2. Layered a second cutapart on top;
  3. stamped some butterflies;
  4. added a ribbon on top;
  5. added a Tim Holtz quote chip, after using some Distress Mica Sprays to grunge it up a bit.

Easy peasy! 😃

Materials used

Quick, easy and lovely: String-tied Layered Cards

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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 🙂

Four Tips for Last-Minute Christmas Cards

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For all of you who are anything like me and are in dire need of some quick, last-minute Christmas cards, I’m sharing four tips to create them!

In my previous post I already shared a step-by-step on how to make the cards in the above picture.

So to summarize: tip 1 is the regular papercraft way of card-making: create designs from cardstock, then mat each seperate part with design paper.

The next two pictures show tip 2: die-cut a sentiment or an image from specialty paper and stick it onto a mixed media background. Then mat on top of cardstock.

With holographic paper
With glitter paper

Here are the materials I used for both of the above backgrounds:

Tip 3: create a mixed media background, but don’t use it as a background. Instead, die-cut something from it and stick it onto some white cardstock. Clean. Simple. Elegant.

Tip 3: Mixed media die-cut on white cardstock

These are the sprays I used for these:

Tip 4 is of course a mixed media die-cut on a mixed media background. Add some glitter accents if you like.

Bonus tip: if you’re not a mixed media kind of crafter, you can use design paper instead! This will give you the same elegant and sophisticated effect, both on white cardstock and on design paper.

Now off you go, hurry up with those last-minute Christmas cards! 🙂

Low Budget Quickscrap Tip: Close-ups of Your Own Projects

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This week I’m sharing a project tip on this blog exclusively, so no Youtube video this time. If you’d like to peruse the other (over 40!) blog exclusives I’ve offered so far, click here!

So, the tip I’m sharing with you today belongs to what I’ve dubbed the quickscrap category, that is to say projects you can finish in 1 hour or less. Perfect if you’re in a bind and absolutely need a card or a gift pronto! And as an extra bonus it is super low budget.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve taken pictures of all of the craft projects you created thus far – and if you haven’t, start doing that right now! For the only thing you really need to create a lovely and most importantly superquick card, is a nice close-up picture of one of your own projects. And by close-up I mean: no background, no borders, just the details of your project. Crop the picture (digitally or physically) if you have to, to make it so.

Step 1

Print the close-up picture on photo paper. Crop it if that’s necessary to get a 100% close-up without backgrounds or borders.

Step 2

Get some nice folded cardstock and accompanying envelope from your stash.

Step 3

Glue the picture onto the front of the card.

Step 4

Cut off the excess of the card if that’s needed to perfectly fit your picture.

And you’re done!

How easy was that! Let me know in the comment section and have fun upcycling your old projects! 🙂

There’s more where that came from! For my other quick photo card tips, check out this post and this post. And for all of my low budget tips, click here!

Don’t forget the Birthday Sale in my shop! Because my birthday is January 11th, I’m celebrating it with you all by offering you a 40% discount on all of the tutorials in my shop, from January 11-13th!