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

For 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.

Then 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 →