Creative Blog Hop: Stars and Tin Foil Card

A hearty welcome to everyone who's hopped on over from Sals Special Spot, and if you've gotten here another way then I strongly recommend you hop on over and check her work out. I have been part of a card swap group Sal runs for about two years now and getting some of her work in the mail every month is like having 12 extra Christmas mornings a year.

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I love it when a few different pieces of inspiration come together and slap you in the face and this card is one of those for me.

It all started last week when a fellow crafter posted a photo of a card she'd made in a Facebook group I belong to, I wish she had a blog so I could link and show you. Basically she's embossed some regular tin foil from the kitchen with swirls then cut out the swirls into the shape of a dress. It sounds simple but looked so amazing. I instantly fell in love with the card but lacking both embossing folders and a steady hand with scissors any attempt I made was going to look like a 4 year old made it. I know my limits.

I then started thinking about what to make a particular special little girl for her birthday - she loves pink and stars.

Stars and tin foil - there's got to be something in that...

Finally I remembered the home-printed cards from the very, very early days of home computers, where after tearing the excess paper off at the perforations you folder the paper in half vertically and then horizontally to get the printed design to the front and the sentiment to the inside. That fold would create the perfect pocket for me to place some tin foil. At this point I almost ran to my crafting corner.

The basic recipe for my card is pretty simple - I cut some stars out of a piece of pink  A4 card in the lower left corner of the page, I then cut another star (upside down, so it would be right way up in the end) in the upper right corner to get a star on the inside of the card too.

I chalked the edges of the stars to get a bit more definition. Folded the card in half horizontally and vertically, and inserted some tin foil I had scrunched up and smoothed out again into the pockets. Finally I sealed up the edges with washi tape and added a 'Happy Birthday' ribbon.

I'm definitely going to be playing with more tin foil, I'm thinking this would make an awesome technique for a Christmas tree card.

Blog Hop Q and A

What are you working on now?

I've just moved into a new house and I've finally got a dedicated crafting area. My project for the moment is digging out all the crafting supplies that have been languishing in boxes for years, remembering why I bought them in the first place and getting my space set up so when the inspiration strikes I can dive right in.
Why do you create what you do?

My first crafting love is scrapbooking, I love preserving memories, especially the everyday stuff, in a way that doesn't feel like sitting through a slide night .
How does your work differ from others in your genre?.

The projects on my blog probably don't showcase it but my crafting superpower is re-purposing materials. Old jeans into new bags, incorporating received cards into new ones (or Christmas Card Ornaments). I recently left a friends birthday party with some of the discarded wrapping paper because I had flash of inspiration looking at it. 
How does your creative process work?

This post is probably a pretty good example, I see things I like and they bounce around my head until suddenly a few ideas collide and a picture jumps into my head of what I want to make. Of course, what I end up making and my first thought are usually miles apart. In my initial thought for this card it was made out of white card with black trim and dozens of tiny stars, but the tiny stars weren't going to showcase the foil the way I wanted, and the intended recipient absolutely loves pink so some changes got made along the way.

Green Leafy Card

This was a quick little card I made for the monthly swap I'm involved in -

Frustratingly, several dozen photos later I still can't get the gold shimmer ribbon, or gold pen accents to pop in the photo the way they do in real life. The paper glass finish on the leaf is something I'm keen to play with a bit more - I love the effect.

The leaf motif is from the silhouette store here and the background shapes I just draw myself in silhouette studio. One thing I like to do is draw a rectangle the sizeof my card in studio so I can then design my card in real size and colour to make sure it works. I then copy the whole design and pull it apart into the different cuts again so I can make sure the keep a copy of my original vision. Not that the final card ends up looking like the original vision too often.

This sketch given for inspiration can be found here.

Thank You Cards

I made these cute cards for a monthly card swap group I'm a part of and I'm loving that the neon colour palette of the 80's is back in fashion. Black and Hot Pink are the greatest colour combination ever, in my humble opinion

When I couldn't find any 'thank you' patterned paper in my stash I made my own using the sketch curly font in silhouette studio and then doing a print'n'cut but you could pull that trick with any old font and word processor. I was a scrapbooker long before I was a cardmaker and consequently I'm always worried about the archival quality of the materials I use. Just making my own printed paper for cards, since archival quality doesn't matter, feels so wild and crazy to me. Clearly I live a sheltered life.

 These arn't a completely original work, there was a sketch given for inspiration so credit where credit is due. I don't think this was the very original posting of this sketch, but it is where the artist's pintrest board directs to, and that's good enough for me.

First Birthday Invite

When I saw this file in the Silhouette store I knew I had found the perfect invite for my daughters first birthday party but as always I couldn't help tweaking the design slightly to my tastes.

I changed the font on the 'st' and 'Birthday' - I prefer a more script style font, and that has also left me with 20x cuts of the word 'Birthday' to put away in my craft stash for later use. I've also got 20x 'st' but I have no idea what I could use those for! Maybe I can use then in some kind of ransom letter design motif. The only problem I had doing this became apparent during the assembly  which was there is a notch out of the pink '1' so that the 'st' is backed by the white card, which was too small for the changed font and the 'st' was showing up pink and white. Nothing a quick snip with the scissors couldn't fix but a little frustrating.

I was very deliberate in the sizing of the card since I had a big box of envelopes on hand that I wanted to use so I sized the invite to fit those. I've made the mistake before of diving straight into the card making and then struggling to find or make an envelope to post it in.

I used the silhouette's print and cut feature to put the event details on the back of the white card - I spent so long looking at the backwards '1' designing that part that I kept getting confused about which way around a '1' actually goes - I blame the sleep deprivation that come from having an almost one year old. I had played around with using my silhouette pen holder to write the invite, I had used a sketch font in the design and even did a prototype. It looked really nice with a glitter gel pen but with a lot of text and the slow speed and double cut required to make the sketch work it was just going to take too much time. 

A few hours of printing, cutting and gluing later and 20 of these was the final result - I'm pretty proud of it.

Sympathy Cards

Unfortunately I had cause to make a sympathy card up recently.

Personally, I prefer to keep such cards fairly plain and simple. I feel the focus should really be on the sentiment and the recipient, rather than a chance to show off some awesome card making technique.

I made them using my silhouette portrait:

• The flourish is from the silhouette store here
• The font is called caneletter script

I had initially cut the white elements to place on the blue card but I ended up preferring (and sending) the white card with the blue paper behind to highlight the negative space. I have to admit to frugal tendencies - I'm always looking for a chance to use both the positive and negative space from cuts, but in this case I really do think both cards work really well in their own right..

Christmas Card Ornaments

January probably seems an odd time to be making Christmas Ornaments but I hate throwing out Christmas cards once the season is over, it seems like I'm throwing out goodwill and good wishes. I was searching the internet for ideas to up-cycle my cards and came across these beautiful Christmas card ornaments here.

I kept the idea in the back of my head for a few weeks, but the right time to sit down and do that much gluing never presented itself with a toddler underfoot. I then stumbled across this blog, which has a free silhouette studio cut file for a folded paper Christmas ornament, and the rest, as they say, is history.  Having a silhouette portrait machine certainly sped up the process for making these but you could cut them by hand very easily too.

My advice if you're going to make these too:

I spent some time trying to pick the prettiest part of each card to cut, but you don't really see enough of each card to make that time well spent.

Try and keep like weighed card together in the balls, mine are deforming slightly where I have really heavy cardstock next to light weight ones.

 These are made mine from 3 inch flowers, which gave me 2 flowers from most of my Christmas cards.