Happy Holiday season everyone!
Let’s create some easy-to-make Christmas cards together: shop your stash (I did! 😃) and make good use of the tips, tricks & tutorials I’m sharing with you in the below videos! Let me know what you think in the comments.
Have a very merry Christmas and a blessed New Year!
You can watch my free video tutorial for my deconstructed envelope card here:
Hope you found these tips & tutorials helpful, either for your Christmas cards or for any other occasion!
Leonardo da Vinci once said that simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, and often I apply that to my paper craft projects: finding beauty in simple designs, by playing with colors or showcasing design paper.
Or even more down to earth than that, keeping it as simple as I can. This is what in project management is called the KISS principle btw: “Keep it Simple, Stupid”. In other words don’t overthink and don’t make things unnecessarily complicated.
Anyway, today I’m sharing three tips with you to keep your card making as simple as possible, yet still very presentable!
K.I.S.S. Card Tip 1: Purchase a lovely card, and mat it onto a piece of double-sided design paper. Very quick & easy, and it looks great. Plus, the inside of your card automatically looks sophisticated as well, with your paper being double-sided.
K.I.S.S. Card Tip 2: Purchase a lovely card, and add a simple decoration, but nothing elaborate. For instance, you could add only 1 bow or flower, or a couple of bling pieces. Or you can do as I did: I bought a large postcard at a museum (yes, those pastries were counted as art, in the sense that they were part of a photo collection…) and added some glitter glue lettering.
K.I.S.S. Card Tip 3: Mat a piece of design paper onto a white card; print or stamp a sentiment, die-cut a label shape around it and add it to the card. These are especially great when you’re creating for someone who’s not into all of that pinky fluffy stuff 🙂
Hope you enjoyed these tips, they can make your card making life a whole lot easier, while still being able to send nice hand-crafted cards to everyone you care to send one to.
Enjoy your week!
I guess I’m over Winter. For when I started thinking about making these two cards, my mind immediately jumped to some yellows, florals, birds, bees and easter bunnies.
So, I’m inviting you to get started with me on some (very) early Easter or Spring cards, get some inspiration from my video or follow along with me to create these exact card designs.
The papers I used were by Craft and You Designs, from their Spring Garden collection.
Have fun crafting and I’d love to know: did you make these along with me, or at least feel inspired to get creating some spring projects of your own? Let me know in the comments down below!
This past year I discovered AliExpress as a great craft supply source, including craft utensils like stamps or cutting dies. This time I’m testing one of several cutting dies I purchased: a DIY gift bag die. It came all the way from China – but would it work?
Spoiler: it worked absolutely fine – I just found the design for the bottom flaps lacking, as it doesn’t enable perfect glue placement and forced me to come up with an extra step – or workaround. Watch the video to see what I mean.
Perhaps this cutting die is actually a dupe, i.e. a design they nicked or imitated (or were “inspired by”) from another company. I mean, we’re talking AliExpress here. However, since one cannot possibly be aware of all cutting die designs worldwide ever, I cannot be sure if this is actually the case with this die. It could also very well be an original design. Should you recognize it however, feel free to leave a note to this effect in the comment section below.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy this 10-minute video tutorial. May it inspire you with yet another way to use up that ginormous stash of design papers you have! 🙂
It doesn’t always have to take many long hours of work to create a beautiful card. In this week’s tutorial I’m sharing an idea for a quick & easy card design, for which you only need some pieces of paper, a piece of string and some tools.
You can use colored cardstock, design paper or a mixed media background to be the showstopper piece. I created my backgrounds with Distress inks by Tim Holtz.
A nice detail of this design is the piece of string, which you wrap around your card and tie into a bow on the inside of your card.
All in all I think you may actually create this card in under ten minutes – provided you already made your mixed media backgrounds at some time in the past, and have them at the ready (if you’re not opting for design paper or colored cardstock).
If you don’t have a die-cutting machine, you could also stamp a sentiment, or adhere a chipboard piece like in the picture below. In case you don’t own an embossing machine, you can easily skip the embossed layer entirely, also like the card below (shown in more detail in the video).
Enjoy the video tutorial! – which is, like this card design, short & sweet 🙂
Recently I decided to put some paints onto some shirts, because why not. Plus, let’s face it, plain shirts look boring in their original state.
I can highly recommend the Tim Holtz Distress Paints to customize any fashion items you have, since they were designed with fabrics in mind. If you know of other brands that are suitable for both papercrafting/mixed media and fabric painting, then please let me know in the comments!
I also played around with my green screen, and it all went a little overboard, so apologies for the ridiculousness of it all – but I had great fun trying 😁
i don’t know about you but my online shopping has multiplied ever since the (several) lockdowns were instated the past 18 months. Which means the number of shipping boxes and other packaging that entered my house also multiplied by a significant factor.
Of course I threw away most of it – but not all. For nice storage boxes can be quite expensive. Plus, while creating your own boxes from scratch is certainly doable (I even have a tutorial available for you in my shop), it takes several hours – and sometimes I just want something quick and easy.
That’s where these packaging boxes come in: they can easily be re-used, especially if you’re in the market for a particular size or shape of storage.
For instance, this small and low-edged box below already looked very smooth and sleek, so it was ideal to alter:
The box below was not perfect (it had some jagged edges) but the size was great for my lipsticks so I decided to use it anyway. Since I planned to fill it to the brim I didn’t bother painting the inside. It turned out quite lovely and I’m still using it to this day:
And as a bonus, here’s a pen holder I created from scratch, using only empty toilet paper rolls. I had this specific project in mind for storing my eyeliners and lipliners, because I didn’t want to spend any money on it.
So, enjoy the video, in which I’m sharing some tutorials for these. Have fun crafting and let me know in the comments what you do with your empty packagings!
Recently I bought two of the Sydney Grace x Temptalia eyeshadow palettes, and found the packaging so lovely that I couldn’t bring myself to simply get rid of those wondrous sleeves, never to be seen again.
So, I turned them into a tea gift booklet, that I sent out to my friend. And let me tell you, that re-purposing was far more satisfying than simply throwing them out. 🙂
I didn’t use any design paper this time, just the two sleeves. For the inside and the two tiny booklets, I made my own mixed media background, using Tim Holtz’s spray and oxide inks.
In the below video I’m sharing this tea gift project, and the steps to create it. Enjoy!
Here’s a fun idea for a New Home (or Welcome Home) card: send them a cute little home decor piece, by way of a 3D house which also functions as a tea light holder! 🙂
I’m sharing a video tutorial below, but first a photo tutorial with the steps to create this project. I used a die from AliExpress, but you could of course also imitate this by drawing a row of four houses yourself and fussy-cutting them.
And here’s the video tutorial, enjoy!
Recently I tried a pop-up die, which effectively cuts a piece of paper that you can then turn into an actual pop-up mechanism.
The video turned into a complete tutorial on how to do all the folds and where to glue, perfect for anyone who has purchased (or owns a similar-looking one to) this die and doesn’t know how it works.
In fact, I’m showing you how to turn this strange-looking diecut into a pop-up mechanism no less than three times. Practice makes perfect! 🙂
I’m sure several brands may offer such a die, though I don’t know of any yet, but AliExpress is of course very very affordable: even when including worldwide shipping it’s still many times more affordable than the same item in Europe. So if you like it, it’s worth a try – you’ll find the link to the shop in the description box of my Youtube video. (And I’m saying this without being sponsored in any way).
So check out the tutorial and let me know if you have ever encountered such a strange-looking die before! 🙂
There are of course hundreds (probably thousands even) of different design paper collections on the market. Still, sometimes you feel you’re in need of another sheet of a particular color scheme to really perfect your project. You could of course purchase (or shop your stash) for a sheet from another collection but: you did you realize you can also create your own? And I don’t mean by becoming a graphic designer yourself and printing some cool computer-generated design you came up with.
No, I mean by applying some very easy mixed media techniques. Here’s how.
2. If you want, you can even print an image – or in my case a graffiti-style initial – on your colored paper. Wait until everything is dry though, before you run it through your printer.
3. Add some stamping. You can choose actual images, or just some random patterns. Use an oil-based ink like Archival ink, to make sure your stamping ink does not react to the other mediums you’ve used so far.
4. Add some texture with texture paste. I used Tim Holtz’s Distress Grit paste because that is translucent (so the inking underneath will show through) plus it’s heat-stable so you can emboss it. Which is exactly what I did after I added the paste: I sprinkled it with different colors of Embossing Glaze (which is a translucent embossing powder), let the texture paste dry, and then embossed it.
5. I (of course) forgot that I needed more than one mat, so I had to repeat steps 1-4 to create a second mat. It would have been easier had I just taken a larger piece of paper, did the mixed media techniques, and only then cut it to size. Oh well.
6. Mat your mini album page! As you can see in the pictures below I made sure to choose colors that would coordinate with the rest of the design paper I used.
Want to see the entire album? Check the video in this blog post!
I have great admiration for design paper companies and their graphic designers: having to come up with unique, lovely and most of all sellable designs several times a year seems like a sheer insurmountable challenge to me. So I can understand that every once in a while some design paper collection comes out on the market that in itself looks great – stunning even – but has a slightly odd theme.
This week I’m sharing what you could do with such fairly non-practical themes; like the pastry-themed Sweety collection by Stamperia.
Other than making me seriously crave some chocolate & cherry pie topped off with some pistachio mint ice cream (yummie!) I’m not sure what to do with this collection, except admire its visual gorgeousness. Yes, I know, the theme is great for birthdays and other parties, but then I would prefer a 6×6″ size for cards and Stamperia doesn’t do those. Now take the 12×12 inch sheets: these elaborate graphic designs look more like a picture you would frame and hang from your wall, than cut it up (how?!) to make it into, say, a mini album or, even more difficult, a card.
So, here’s what I do whenever I encounter a collection I love but cannot for the life of me think of a project intended for some actual, practical use: I buy only the cutapart sheet, and design one card around it, preferably while using up the entire sheet.
The Stamperia cutapart sheets are always great, plus, they come with beautiful journalling spots on the back. Perfect.
So, here’s a short video tutorial on how to design a card around your specific cutaparts. If your cutapart sheet has differently sized cutaparts, then here’s a tutorial around a second design.
Enjoy the video, feel free to craft along! 🙂
