Category Archives: Low budget

Here’s all my low budget projects, by which I mean you need only very few basic materials. Enjoy!

Three Very Easy Cards, The K.I.S.S. Way

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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!

Vintage Trifold Card

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When your double-sided paper is beautiful on both sides and you cannot decide which one to mat on a card, it’s time to create a card without cardstock! This way, you can showcase both sides of your gorgeous design paper sheet.

For me it was a sheet from the Time is an Illusion collection by Stamperia. That design paper collection is truly a work of art!

Cut a 12″ inch strip of your sheet, at the height you want your card to be. Fold in two places to create a trifold – make sure one panel overlaps the other.

Use a strip of paper or a tag to create a closure. Watch the video on my latest steampunk mini album, which actually features this card and in which I go over the closure technique in more detail.

Decorate the front of your card.

Add a journalling spot on the inside. You don’t have to add anything else since your paper is already lovely in and of itself!

Add a decorative element on the back. I chose a cutapart with a sentiment. Done!

Have you made any cards without cardstock? Tell me about it in the comments, I’d love to hear about it!

Testing a DIY Gift Bag Die (craft along with me)

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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! 🙂

Quick, easy and lovely: String-tied Layered Cards

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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 🙂

How to make your own storage trays

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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!

3 Tips to Squeeze Out Projects With Dwindling Design Papers

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Every time I finish a craft project, I have design papers left over. Doesn’t matter whether it was a large mini album, or just a card; always there are sheets of loveliness I have to decide on what to do with them. Will I have to throw them out, of can I come up with yet another idea?

Fortunately as crafters we can always create something else with these extra papers, sometimes ending up with more than one bonus project.

A few weeks ago I created quite an elaborate desconstructed envelope card from 3 sheets of design paper + a cutapart sheet. But even after such a large card, I managed to squeeze out three extra cards from the paper pieces I had leftover!

So, hopefully I can inspire you with these ideas, to do the same and make use of every inch of paper real estate you can manage 🙂

Enjoy the video, happy crafting!

Frugal Crafting: A Budget-friendly Card

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This week I’m sharing a tip to make the most out of your precious (and often quite expensive!) design papers: use up as much of your leftover scraps as you can and turn them into a new project, in this case a card.

Here are the scraps and leftovers I worked with…

…doesn’t look like much does it? And yet, with some simple techniques and a little bit of creativity you can still make something lovely from them.

So here’s to never having to throw away your leftovers ever again! (unless you want to 😉 )

Enjoy the video for a detailed show & tell!

Flower Pot Box Card

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This year’s Mother’s Day is kinda strange – with the corona lockdown situation and all – so even if you never send out any Mother’s Day cards, this year you will have to make an exception! Never have our mothers deserved some encouragement with a beautiful card more than now – so come on, get your craft on and make her this fun card.

What I’m sharing with you this week is a variant of the box card. It’s slightly different from the regular box cards, the same basic technique but still some new crafty tricks are required – which will offer a nice new challenge. And because it’s Mother’s Day during these lockdown times, I’m offering this special variant guide for free, as a bonus with my Box Card tutorial #26!

You can find my box card tutorial – including the free bonus cutting guide & instructions for this variant! – in my shop, it’s already waiting for you. Think about all those lovely papers in your stack; you know, the ones your mother told you she loved. And you only need 1 sheet of cardstock to make this anyway. So what’s the big deal, just go ahead and check it out. You know you want to 😉 .

Quick & Easy Card Tip!

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#stillintimeforchristmas 🙂

If you’d love to create your own Christmas cards and don’t know how, or simply don’t have the time to spend several hours on only one card, this week’s post is for you!

The concept is so simple that I felt I couldn’t even make an entire video around it. So, in this blog exclusive, I’m basing my idea on two of my earlier tips: 1. Digitally designing your own patterns and layouts, and 2. using a printed picture instead of design paper.

This week’s project combines those two tips. I first designed a digital collage around a baby girl theme. For this I always use collections of digital elements I purchase from designers, and then combine these elements into unique collages with an app on my iPad, in this case PicCollage. You could also use other apps, or work with Powerpoint on your PC.

I then have my digital collage printed at a professional photo printing service. You could of course also print it yourself.

The final step is to mat the picture onto a nicely colored double card.

Easy peasy! 🙂

I did mine up as a baby card, but this would of course also work perfectly for Christmas!

Low budget tip: Working your scraps into a fun project!

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So, what to do with all of these leftovers from your papercraft projects? Design paper scraps, cardstock scraps and even chipboard scraps – do you throw them all out? That could work, clutterfree living is a ‘thing’ nowadays after all.

However, you can also choose the Frugal Crafter’s perspective: when I consider my scraps, I don’t see waste, I see paper real estate! That’s why this week’s post is about a practical way to work with several different kinds of leftovers and create a very fun project with them. And it will be very budget-friendly indeed 🙂

Also, it’s a new video tutorial on how to create my so-called scrap mats. I have done one before but that was many many moons ago, so I thought it time for a fresh one…

I’m working with the leftovers of my recent Double-Stacked Too album, with papers from the Serenade and Clippings collections by Basic Grey.

Scrap mats make brilliant background mats for your projects

1-Layer Explosion Box with only 2 sheets of design paper

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Up until now my explosion boxes had always had at least two layers of decorated cardstock, oftentimes even three. This week however I’m sharing a different kind of explosion box:

  • it has only one layer;
  • it only needs two sheets of double-sided design paper to make and decorate

The two sheets I used were from the Vintage Circus collection by Scrapberry’s, which has beautiful muted tones, giving it a vintage yet colorful atmosphere. I decorated with fussy-cut bits from the design paper – and, I admit, a tiny little bit of colored cardstock to diecut some curls.

In its center it sports a tiny paper box with some birds and butterflies ‘flying away’ from it, and in its center there’s a ‘floating’ micro book with some actual pages!

So there’s an idea for an alternative birthday card, which mine is going for. You can’t mail it of course, you’ll have to hand it out yourself – but that only adds to the fun! 🙂

If you’d like to make one yourself, I offer a very elaborate pdf tutorial with dozens and dozens of clear pictures in my webshop.

Low Budget Quickscrap Tip: Close-ups of Your Own Projects

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This week I’m sharing a project tip on this blog exclusively, so no Youtube video this time. If you’d like to peruse the other (over 40!) blog exclusives I’ve offered so far, click here!

So, the tip I’m sharing with you today belongs to what I’ve dubbed the quickscrap category, that is to say projects you can finish in 1 hour or less. Perfect if you’re in a bind and absolutely need a card or a gift pronto! And as an extra bonus it is super low budget.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve taken pictures of all of the craft projects you created thus far – and if you haven’t, start doing that right now! For the only thing you really need to create a lovely and most importantly superquick card, is a nice close-up picture of one of your own projects. And by close-up I mean: no background, no borders, just the details of your project. Crop the picture (digitally or physically) if you have to, to make it so.

Step 1

Print the close-up picture on photo paper. Crop it if that’s necessary to get a 100% close-up without backgrounds or borders.

Step 2

Get some nice folded cardstock and accompanying envelope from your stash.

Step 3

Glue the picture onto the front of the card.

Step 4

Cut off the excess of the card if that’s needed to perfectly fit your picture.

And you’re done!

How easy was that! Let me know in the comment section and have fun upcycling your old projects! 🙂

There’s more where that came from! For my other quick photo card tips, check out this post and this post. And for all of my low budget tips, click here!

Don’t forget the Birthday Sale in my shop! Because my birthday is January 11th, I’m celebrating it with you all by offering you a 40% discount on all of the tutorials in my shop, from January 11-13th!