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..