Category Archives: Quick Scrap

Quick little projects of under 60 minutes:

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!

Vintage Easter Card

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I realize Easter is already over, but I forgot to post this – as well as my other Easter card, which I will post next. After all, it’s the thought that counts – and you can use these techniques of layering and adding a small booklet to the front, as inspiration for your own cards. For any occasion you can think of! 🙂

Papers used: Easter Greetings collection by Craft and You.

I found this very appropriate stamp for the season on AliExpress

1-sheet Summer Breeze Step Card – No Cardstock!

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Double-sided design paper sheets are the perfect material to create a quick step card. The one I used is from the Summer Breeze collection by Studiolight.

You can either find a template online and print/draw, fold and cut it yourself, or you can use a step card die. With the card’s basic shape taken care of, the only thing left is to decorate!

For instance: cut an ATC card and stamp a sentiment. I also added some heat embossing to the sentiment, for some extra interest. Then apply some kind of glitter glue all along the edges and adhere as a center piece.

Use some hot glue or other heavy adhesive medium to adhere larger decorations, like these bulky roses.

Don’t forget the backside of the card! I know it’s just the back, but you can still add some nice little detail to surprise the careful examiner 😊

For instance, add some transparent texture paste through a stencil on part of the back!💡

Add some final diecuts and smaller decorative elements, and you’re done – quick & easy!

Quick Birthday Tag – Vintage Style!

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Tip: You don’t always need to create a full-blown birthday card, a nice tag will go a long way too – especially when added to a gift to carry your birthday wishes.

Here’s an easy little gift tag and the steps to create it. I designed it to go with some birthday flowers for a friend.

  1. I chose a cutapart from Stamperia’s Time is an Illusion collection;
  2. Layered a second cutapart on top;
  3. stamped some butterflies;
  4. added a ribbon on top;
  5. added a Tim Holtz quote chip, after using some Distress Mica Sprays to grunge it up a bit.

Easy peasy! 😃

Materials used

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 🙂

Four Tips for Last-Minute Christmas Cards

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For all of you who are anything like me and are in dire need of some quick, last-minute Christmas cards, I’m sharing four tips to create them!

In my previous post I already shared a step-by-step on how to make the cards in the above picture.

So to summarize: tip 1 is the regular papercraft way of card-making: create designs from cardstock, then mat each seperate part with design paper.

The next two pictures show tip 2: die-cut a sentiment or an image from specialty paper and stick it onto a mixed media background. Then mat on top of cardstock.

With holographic paper
With glitter paper

Here are the materials I used for both of the above backgrounds:

Tip 3: create a mixed media background, but don’t use it as a background. Instead, die-cut something from it and stick it onto some white cardstock. Clean. Simple. Elegant.

Tip 3: Mixed media die-cut on white cardstock

These are the sprays I used for these:

Tip 4 is of course a mixed media die-cut on a mixed media background. Add some glitter accents if you like.

Bonus tip: if you’re not a mixed media kind of crafter, you can use design paper instead! This will give you the same elegant and sophisticated effect, both on white cardstock and on design paper.

Now off you go, hurry up with those last-minute Christmas cards! 🙂

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!

How to Create with a Cut-apart Sheet

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This week I’m sharing a free video tutorial again, on how to create a quick & easy card using only 1 cut-apart sheet and some cardstock. The paper I used was from the When We First Met collection by Piatek Trzynastego, a Polish brand.

Near the end of the video I’m sharing a bonus idea on what to do with the one leftover piece of your cut-apart sheet: easy, make another card! 🙂

Enjoy the video, hope you’ll find it inspiring!

One cutapart leftover? No problem, create a whole new card with it!

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

Quickscrap Project: Springtime Tag / Bookmark

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Spring is coming, and although it’s still howling and storming with raging winds and rain here in the Netherlands, I already pruned my apple & pear trees and the first daffodils are blooming in my garden 🙂

So, time to take my Celebrate Spring collection by Studiolight and create something happily colorful. I created a relatively large tag, using some papers, diecuts and cut-aparts. The butterfly is a Prima butterfly made from white fabric, which I sprayed and inked myself.

Since this tag was going to function as a bookmark, I made sure to keep everything as flat as possible. The only little bit of dimension I used was near the top edge, since that would be sticking out from a book 🙂

And since it would also go with a birthday gift to my friend, I gave it a birthday theme on both sides!

Fancy more of my under-1-hour Quickscrap projects? Click here, where you’ll find them all!

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!