birthday

Cards Using Handmade Paper

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A few months ago, I made some paper and wanted to use it in some cards.

Christmas card using handmade paperFor Christmas, I had grand plans for a cool card that had a little gingerbread man stamped directly on the handmade paper. However, I completely forgot that the paper was still textured and the image barely showed up. It didn’t occur to me to iron the paper or flatten it using my Cuttlebug, so I went with plan B and just used the paper as a background panel. It turned out cute and simple, so I was fine with it.

Birthday card using handmade paperThen for birthday cards, I decided to use an embossing plate to give it a swirly texture. My big plan for this one was to have a hole punched in the textured paper and then stamp the sentiment on the main card paper through the hole. Um, not as easy as it seemed in my head. Again I turned to my trusty plan B. I grabbed some tracing paper (I hope to find my vellum one of these days) and a test panel I made with regular copy paper to line up where to stamp the sentiment. Then I just attached it with brads. Similar effect with a little more visual interest. I love when plans change for the better! Continue reading →

Creatively Improvising

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Last week, creativity came in the form of needing to improvise a little on wrapping a gift for my niece who is turning 4.

I searched through my wrapping paper only to find that the only thing I had that was close to birthday paper was plain, cobolt blue paper. Not ideal for a girly girl who likes sparkle, but I needed to get the gifts wrapped and ready to ship that night. No time to run out and buy more wrapping paper. Fortunately, her favorite color at the moment is blue.

So I grabbed some silver, gold, and copper metallic paper and some of my Stampin’ Up! punches. Then I punched out several metallic hearts, butterflies, and flowers and put them all over the blue wrapping paper. I wish I had remembered to take a picture because it turned out pretty cute.

Before wrapping her gift, I didn’t really have an idea in mind for a card yet, Butterflies Birthday Cardother than wanting to put 4 of something on it for her fourth birthday. An added bonus of decorating the gift with the punched shapes was that it gave me an idea for the card.

The butterflies in silver were my favorite shapes on the gift, so I punched out 4 more of them. It’s tough to see in this photo, but they are shiny and placed on the card with dimensional tape.

Keeping with the “4” theme I put 4 strips of paper behind the butterflies. They are cut as not perfect rectangles so they look a little more interesting. The card turned out cute and I liked having the card kinda coordinate with the wrapping with the silver butterflies.

While it would have been nice and a lot quicker to have actual birthday wrapping paper on hand, it was a lot of fun finding a way to make what I did have work.