I am so excited! This card turned out so darn cute and its a paper bag! I saw a YouTube video by Claudia Rosa where she showed a card made from an everyday brown paper lunch bag. I think her card was a birthday card for a male but with Christmas right around the corner I thought I'd transform it into a Christmas card. Drum roll please..............
This is a large size lunch bag that I got from Target. The papers are from a Christmas Paper pack by Paper studio that I bought from Hobby Lobby and some Kraft paper. Ribbons are from an old spool of ribbon so I have no idea where I got it from. I used misc cling stamps and some green snowflakes to add a little bling. The 2 ribbon on the front side pull out to expose little tags which the recipient could use as gift tags if they'd like. I put together some kits for my ladies group to put together the next time we do our stamping. These are large cards so homemade envelopes would be a good idea.
Decided to try one that doesn't open and just has a tag pocket in front. It turned out real cute too. Kind of wondering what other color combinations I could use and whether or not the smaller lunch bags would work. I'll have to give that a try.
I'll write up the directions for these after I try the smaller bag size. I can't wait to mail these as I'm sure the people who get them are going to love it!
Until Later....................
HAPPY CARDING!!!
I'm back! It's been such a crazy fall. Closed up our summer place and got back in time to watch our granddaughter "Cheer" for our local football team. The next thing I know it's Halloween and everyone is coming down with an annoying virus. UGH!
So the other day I was working on a project and I was using WAY too much of my tape runner. When working on bigger cards with large mats you do tend to use alot of tape. You also have to be sure it's right on the edge so the ends don't lift and heaven help you if you don't get it smooth the first time down. Ripping it up to reposition is a royal pain. So I headed for my glue stick bin and of course I have more than one brand so which one is going to work best? I need to adhere a 6x8 piece of designer paper to a paper lunch bag. I've tried liquid glues before and have had multiple problems. Besides being messy, depending on the glue you use it could cause bumps where the glue was placed. Or depending on the paper it could cause wrinkles. I therefore decided a glue stick was the way to go. But which one? One to never use in my opinion is the Children's School Glue stick. Sure its safe (non-toxic) but as soon as it dried you can peel off what you glued down sprinkling glue flakes as you do.
Here are the four I tried with my paper bag project (I'll share that in a later post...it's pretty cool).
The top stick is made by Scotch. It's permanent and glides on nicely. I did not have any wrinkling or bubbles and it did not take long to dry. Maybe 15min or so. It had a decent bond that I was happy with. The one on bottom left is by Avery. It too is permanent but I found it didn't have a long lasting hold. Maybe a week later you could tell that it was lifting around the edges of the large piece and on smaller pieces some completely fell off. No glue flake sprinkles tho. In the middle I have Elmer's Craft Bond. It would have been the brand I thought would work great but I was disappointed. By the time I finished adhering the glue to my 6x8 sheet it had already dried in some places and if I went back to re-glue the previously wet surface was now drying. It was a big race against the clock. A race I didn't like! It was a strong bond but not much different then the Scotch brand one. If I had to choose between the Elmer's and the Scotch I'd pick Scotch because of it's open work time. The last one on right is by Thermo-Web. Definitely holds but the glue in this stick is kind of soft making it a bit messy to use. Not easily accessible. I use to be able to get this at Archivers until they closed. I haven't seen it at my local craft stores recently so altho I love the hold it's not going to be my go to glue.
So my conclusion????? Personally I'd go with the Scotch Brand. Available at local craft stores, strong bond, glides nice, no wrinkling or bubbling. Do you have a favorite? Let me know so I can give it a try.
Well till later when I share my paper bag project!
HAPPY CARDING!!!
So I decided to post a non card Halloween greeting. I was looking for a Halloween craft to do with my granddaughter and saw these Halloween blocks at a craft show. They looked super easy so I thought what the heck a 6 year old can do this along with a little help from my Cricut for the letters.
The blocks are just scrap 2 x 4's that I had my husband cut into 5" pieces. We painted the sides with Black acrylic paint and then picked out some printed Halloween card stock and cut it to fit. Ours were cut 3.5 x 5 but all 2 x 4's are different and not true 2x4 so cut your papers according to your block size. We then went to my Cricut and using the Plantain School cartridge we cut out 3" letters to fit on the block. We liked the way the blocks with the O's on them looked sideways but you could place them upright. These sit on our fireplace mantles along with some wooden pumpkins and wooden candy corns for decoration. Whats also cool about these is that you can reverse them for Christmas.
 |
| Back side of BOO |
Same blocks .... different season! Pretty cool huh? My granddaughter loved making these and we just might make a few more for gifts. I was thinking of using 4 blocks instead and have 1 side read FALL and the other Noel.
Well that's my little non card greeting. Just wanted to share!
HAPPY CARDING!
Another day...another Christmas! This stamp is certainly getting a work out! Then again it could because I only brought 3 stamps with me to the cabin. LOL This one I really don't like much and I will be re-doing it in the future. I tried to make a scallop on the side using a salt shaker for the template and a razor knife to cut it. First it's way too large of a scallop and secondly cutting with a razor knife stinks! Or maybe I just stink at using a razor knife which is definitely possible.
To hide all my bloops when I cut the scallops I added little dashes to them. Not my best idea for sure and then I had made a slight score, in order to keep scallops even, that I thought I could press out but that failed too. Now looking at it I guess I should have also dashed the banner so it stands out more but........
This card is definitely a would of, should of, could of! LOL. I guess we can't get it right all of the time and I just thought I'd share my mistakes. We all make them right?
I think I'm going to go through my granddaughters decorative scissors and grab a few for the cabin so I have a few more options. She'll never miss them!
Back to the drawing board........lets see what I want to do next. Until then..........................
HAPPY CARDING!
Well I mentioned in my post "Simply Christmas" that I was going to try using that stamp on different color cardstock and with silver or gold ink. So down to my craft room I went, dug out paper, ink and emboss powders. I just so happened to have silver and gold powders and decided to put it over silver or gold ink. First let me say that just using the silver or gold on the darker cardstock alone looked great. I did the gold both on the black and the red cardstock and used elegant gold embossing powder and on the green paper I used the silver ink and embossing powder.
Ok this pic I used a flash
And this one had no flash
What is with and taking pictures. I swear I never get the result I want. As usual these card fronts look waaayyyy better in real life. Guess you'll just have to take my word for it. Go ahead an give these a try with a similar stamp for a really elegant looking card. I especially love the gold on the black. can't wait to put these cards together.
Well tanks for checking back. I just wanted to show the results using different ink and colored paper.
HAPPY CARDING!!!!!!!!
Ahhhhh.....I think I'm really getting into the Christmas season and Halloween isn't even here yet! Plus I still need to make 3 more Halloween Cards! I think I'll work on those this weekend. But for now it's another Christmas card and this one is sooooo darn simple!
I used a stamp by Our Daily Bread called Christmas Tree Collage. It's a cling stamp so very easy to position.
The card base is a basic 4.25" x 11" white cardstock 110# Recollection brand, scored at 5.5". I then matted with a piece of cherry red cardstock 4 1/8" x 5 3/8". Next was white card measuring 4" x 5 1/4" . Centering the stamp so that there is a white border I stamped using color box black ink and then covered it with clear embossing powder. The ornaments are colored in with a glitter gel pen. Organza ribbon with a clear rhinestone finishes it off. This card seriously only took like 8 minutes to make. Imagine how many of these you could whip up in an afternoon! As usual my inside is not stamped since I tend to like to write something personal to each person receiving my cards. Well I know if I need just a few extra cards I'll be making these. Maybe change up the mat color to blue or green and color ornaments to match or maybe stamp the image in red or green or gold and leave the ornaments clear with glossy accents. Ohhhhh....another idea would be to stamp silver or gold on Red, Green or Black cardstock. I bet that would look pretty elegant. Maybe I'll try that this afternoon.
Hope you have a wonderful day........................
HAPPY CARDING!
Good Morning! Ready for another Christmas card? This one was one I also had to try to be creative with since I made it at the cabin too. I usually don't bring my big shot up with me and although I have a Texture Boutique that I don't use at home, I have not yet decided to take it to the cabin to keep there but it sure would come in hand when I want some texture to my cards. This time I took a piece of Kraft card stock, wrinkled it up, and
then ironed it flat again. I wasn't totally thrilled with the look so then I decided to rub a versa pad over the top and sprinkle clear embossing powder over it.
The left side had the powder all over it and the right was when I started to heat set it. I pretty much liked that result.
Although the paper above looks all wavy, it's really pretty flat. The camera doesn't do it any real justice because in real view it looks more leathery. So now to design the card. I used a Northwoods stamp of a pine tree with cardinals in it. If you are familiar with Northwoods Stamps, alot of their winter stamps have cardinals in them and I really love how the red really pops!
Of course after all that work of embossing the kraft paper.....nearly none showed up in the card. Guess I could have just inked the edges of the kraft paper. I used old olive for a mat and found a piece of blue card stock ( not sure where I got it from) as the base of the card. I had a small piece of green ribbon that just so happened to match the old olive paper. The inside of the card is still blank. There are little dots of Diamond Stickles around and on the tree. I think in the future doing this wrinkle and emboss will only be used for tiny accents though. Right now with the way I used it, this has turned out to be quite a heavy card. I'm sure that if the kraft paper was just textured with an embossing folder the card would be much lighter. I think the powder added too much weight. But you make do with what you have. Maybe this won't be a mailed card but a hand delivered one instead. Well that's it for today. Check back tomorrow for another super simple Christmas card! Til then............................
HAPPY CARDING!
