For some time now, I have been irritated at the price of greeting cards, it seems like everything else the price just keeps going up.
I know a few people who make their own cards, some of them selling them to stores. One of my friends has been making just for her own use for about three years now, and everytime we visit I enjoy looking at the cards she has made for different people. She went to classes and her cards just beautiful.
Now I am not in a position to go to card making classes, but she has inspired me to take the plunge and start making my own cards.
I stopped off at spotlight on the way home and bought a few basic supplies, based on what she has told me I will need. Now I am lucky that with our homeschooling, over the years we have quite a few useful items anyway, so I spent the trip home thinking about what my very first card would be.
I decided on a window frame and inside it a christmas tree. I had found some stick on christmas tree lights so I thought I could put them around the window frame.
My first problem was the tree. I didn””””t have any stamps or stickers that I could use as a tree, so I started to try drawing my own. It very quickly became obvious that it wasn””””t going to work, so I took a couple of days trying to think up a solution. And then I remembered that every year we took a picture of our own christmas tree on christmas morning. This is what we used in the end.
While I was pondering my tree, I also spent some time on the web looking at how others made there cards. I learnt a lot in this time, but one of the things that stood out to me was stamping, or more to the point embossed stamping.
Now I had always seen stamping as a stick a stamp on a bit of paper and be done with. But it appears that there is so much more to stamping than I first realised.
I talked Bevan into taking me to the scrapbooking store on Saturday, and I invested in a basic embossing stamp pad, a few embossing powders and a new stamp. I also bought some stamp cleaner to clean the stamps that Sammie had been playing with for years.
The end result was an embossed heart card with a pen and ink Merry Christmas on it. Not too bad for a first try I thought.
My third card was simply a matter of combining paper, cardboard and stickers to make a very quick and simple card. Looks Ok, what do you think?
