I rarely craft during the summer because when the weather is warm and the sun is shining I’d rather be outside reading in my hammock or screaming at my garden. Now that we are firmly back into the miserable months that have ‘r’ in the name, it’s time to get back to the crafting table.
I signed up for a card swap in order to force myself to make cards again and it worked!
I tried to keep the cards simple.
To start, I cut brown paper into 6″x6″ panels.
Next I stamped a floral background onto the brown panels using a combination of red, orange, and yellow inks. I don’t usually blend inks like this, and I was pleasantly surprised at how nice it looked.
I trimmed the panels down to a size that would fit the front of a 4 1/4″ by 5 1/2″ card and leave a bit of white space around the edges. I used my Sizzix Big Shot machine to cut out brown ‘hello’ sentiments for the front. I was originally going to put the hellos in the dead center of the card, but after the ink dried I saw that the yellow faded into the brown more than I wanted. I decided to move the hellos to the left side of the bottom third of the card. (See: Rule of Thirds.)
When I stacked everything up, I didn’t like how much white space I had left, so after some despair I ended up cutting out slightly larger panels in a darker brown to stack behind the lighter brown. It looked much better, and my despair faded.
And finally I spent what felt like hours gluing everything together. I ended up with 14 cards. I aimed for 15 cards, but one of them was so crooked I couldn’t get away with passing it off as ‘artisan’ which is the excuse I use for most of my card errors.
I stamped “today is full of possible” inside (it’s twee and optimistic, but so am I sometimes), wrote them up carried them to work with me to mail. (Sometimes mail arrives faster if I mail it from Philadelphia.) And then I forgot to mail them there, so I carried them home and mailed them from here.
It felt really good to get back to the crafting table – like I’m finding a part of myself again. And I’ve already started on the handmade holiday cards!
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