Tag Archives: Tips

7 Creative Ways to Fill a Mini Album with Pictures

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A couple of years ago I designed and created a very sturdy folio mini album, with the nature-themed Time to Flourish collection by Graphic 45. My mother now owns it, and she asked me to fill it up with some of the awesome closeup pictures my father took, mostly of flowers, insects and birds in their own garden.

And since it’s always nice to see a handcrafted mini album filled up with pictures, I thought I’d share it with you one more time 🙂 .

In the video I’ll be sharing some general tips for filling your mini albums with pictures:

  • Don’t be afraid to rigorously crop your pictures when your page design or paper pattern requires it;
  • Die-cut your pictures into shapes, like circles, rectangles, squares, labels;
  • Apply glitter glue or liquid pearl all around the edges of some of your pictures;
  • Fussy cut the main subject from your pictures if the background or the rest of the picture is boring or irrelevant;
  • Trim your pictures down to miniature size to fit them onto smaller tags – simply find a picture with a small main subject;
  • If two pictures don’t fit onto one page, use washi tape as a hinge for one of them and stack them;
  • And last but not least, my favorite: color-coordinate between your pictures and your design paper as much as you can!

If you want to create this yourself, check out my tutorial. I also did a second iteration with a masculine paper collection, you can find that one here.

Cottage Rose Deconstructed Envelope Card

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Sometimes I only buy 2 or 3 sheets from a design paper collection, mostly when I like the idea of it, but not the entire collection. This was the case with Kaisercraft’s Cottage Rose collection, which had lovely soft colors and some great graphic designs, but which overall I found too generic and boring to buy in its entirety.

So, I chose the sheets I liked the most, and used them all up in one go.

I turned them into four cards, one of which I’m sharing with you this week: a deconstructed envelope card. Also great for Valentine’s Day, btw 🙂

If you’d like to make one yourself, you can check out my free video tutorial!

Low budget tip: Working your scraps into a fun project!

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So, what to do with all of these leftovers from your papercraft projects? Design paper scraps, cardstock scraps and even chipboard scraps – do you throw them all out? That could work, clutterfree living is a ‘thing’ nowadays after all.

However, you can also choose the Frugal Crafter’s perspective: when I consider my scraps, I don’t see waste, I see paper real estate! That’s why this week’s post is about a practical way to work with several different kinds of leftovers and create a very fun project with them. And it will be very budget-friendly indeed 🙂

Also, it’s a new video tutorial on how to create my so-called scrap mats. I have done one before but that was many many moons ago, so I thought it time for a fresh one…

I’m working with the leftovers of my recent Double-Stacked Too album, with papers from the Serenade and Clippings collections by Basic Grey.

Scrap mats make brilliant background mats for your projects

Tips & Variations for Napkin Fold Cards

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Napkin fold cards or origami fold cards are always the perfect creative card if you don’t have a lot of time. You can make this within the hour, which adds it to my quick scrap category 🙂

I’ve done several of them in the past, for inspiration you can check out all of those posts in a row.

This week I’m sharing three tips with you for this type of card, variations you may not have tried yourself yet and which I hope will inspire you. So check out the video for those tips. Below that you’ll find my free video tutorial for napkin fold cards, which I hope will come in handy 😉

 

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33 Tips for your Christmas Cards

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Christmas time is nearing and for all of you who’d like to create their own Christmas cards but are wondering how not to make them all mostly the same, I’ve compiled a stack of cards – and 33 variation tips to go with them!

Have fun watching the video, then please find all of the 33 tips listed below for your convenience!

The list with 33 (Christmas) card tips:

Continue reading →

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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