Card Making

A Birthday Card with a Gift Voucher Inside

on August 3, 2009

Today I want to share with you a card that I designed for Bisous, using their fabulous papers from the Violet collection.

I wanted to make a card for my sister as her birthday was approaching fast, but I wanted to make her something a little different. My first thought was something to do with handbags or shoes, because like most girly girls, she loves shopping and accessorizing. As I scribbled some sketches for handbag type cards, I came up with this simple and fun design, that sorta resembles a handbag, with its little magnetic closure, but also has a place to hold a gift voucher.

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Cut a long strip of pattern paper to slightly larger than the width of your finished card. using a scoring tool and and ruler, score the paper twice so that there is a flap that folds up neatly and a flap that folds down to create the cover. This cover can be narrower than the other two. Next slice a narrow strip of the edge of the top two panels, leaving the third panel to be slightly wider. You can staple the gift voucher to this strip and it can be folded over so the voucher lies neatly inside the card.

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Next take a piece of pattern paper and cut to slightly smaller than the middle panel of the card. I designed the message on Photoshop and printed onto plain white A4 paper. Then I stuck the rectangle of pattern paper on top using masking tape and ran it through the printer once more. This is a great way to print in the exact place where you want the message to be, and it also means you are not wasting pattern paper.

Once you have the message on this rectangle of paper, put double sided stick tape along the top, bottom and one of the edges. Because one edge will be open, we can create a tag to slide in and out to reveal a message. You can even use this technique to create a little pocket to hold a gift card, and then write the message on the bottom flap instead.

To finish off this card, I used little flat magnets to act as a closure, and I decorated the front with pretty Prima flowers, some pattern chipboard from Bisous and some buttons.

Lovely jubbly.

I wouldn’t mind getting a card like this with some gift vouchers in it. Would you?

Don’t forget to share this with all your friends, thanks!

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Cute Set Of Note Cards – A Perfect Gift

on July 8, 2009

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Quick and Easy peasy post today.

What better way to use up scraps than to make a set of Mini Note Cards. That’s exactly what i’ve done here with some Bisous papers once again mostly from the Grace Line. The inspiration for these note cards was actually the printed chipboard pieces from Bisous which you are probably already well aware that I LOOOVE! I noticed that there were little flower shapes which had circles inside them, so you could use either one, the other, or both. I was curious to see if I placed a prima blossom flower over the chipboard outer area, and then tried to push the circle chipboard piece into the shape – would this work? What a wonderful surprise to find that Yes, it did work – but it also made the petals of the blossom stand out from the card instead of lying flat. It was perfect, and lots of fun.

So I made a selection of these little cards, and using some scrap papers to create envelopes. Maybe i’ll make a little box for them to go in too and that way I can give them away as a gift.

I hope you like it, and don’t forget you can leave me a comment here.

Design Team work for Bisous
See my work published in this months Bisous newsletter here and you can check out my Bisous interview here.

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'A Little Birdie Told Me Its Your Special Day'.

on July 6, 2009

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Today’s Bisous project is a card I made with left over scraps of paper from the Grace collection from Bisous. There was one of the pre-designed pattern papers that I was being particularly drawn to as it had a number of circles on the page, each one a different pattern. I really liked the idea of cutting these out using a circle punch, and then rearranging them in a different way. And this card is what I came up with.

Once I had cut out the circles with my punch, I started rearranging them on my worktable, and thought that they would look great as a tree. Given the fact that nature themes are so hot right now, I decided to give it a try. Using a scrap of paper from the same range, I roughly cut out a tree trunk. Yes, this was definitely the direction I wanted to go – but what about the basis of the card?

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Well, I wanted kraft cardstock, but I didn’t have any, so this pale brown colour would have to do. Unfortunately it wasn’t very wide, but I decided to work with it and make the front of the card narrower than the back. I promptly grabbed a piece of paper from my scrap box which had this lovely pink scallop border along it, and cut it slightly narrower so that it could cover the exposed section, but I also had a small narrow strip to put on the inside on the left hand side of the card. It was only after I had stuck one of these pink strips down, that I realised that I could hang a length of ribbon across from one side to the other, and stick a greeting to the ribbon. So I had to carefully peel the paper off again – but i’m glad I did as I am really pleased with the end result. The greeting is just two circles punched from scraps, and then I used these great Scrappy cat Monogram stamp set to create a message. I stuck on on the front of the ribbon and one behind to create a ‘ribbon sandwich’, using tape runner to stick them quickly and securely.

The outside was quickly assembled using scraps of paper from the Crave collection, in order to bring a little more colour onto the front of the card, with some help from my corner rounder and an ink pad to ink up the edges a little. I then started building my tree, using a number of foam pads to vary the depth of every circle. But i wanted something more so I made a quick floral embellishment myself using a scallop circle punch & an old french novel, a prima flower and a small circle punch – all held together in place by a staple. Easy peasy.

For the message I used word strips from Crave paper 2 side A along with some mini alpha stamps from Studio G, and I also put my dymo machine to work for the inside. The finishing touch is my favourite element – the chipboard birdie from the Bisous Crave line. Tweet tweet.

More Bisous Design Team reveals tomorrow, so come back to see some more.

Design Team work for Bisous
See my work published in this months Bisous newsletter here and you can check out my Bisous interview here.

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