Hand Made Cards:

I belong to a card making group and we meet once a month for a card exchange. Here are two cards and envelopes that I made for the swap this Wednesday. I am behind so I owe cards, otherwise I'd only have to make one set. The way the card swap works is, we each make 10 of the same card so when we swap we come home with one of our own and 9 different ones. It's a lot of fun. We get to learn some stamping techniques (which I usually don't remember). It keeps me out of trouble and helps with my creativity. Also, I get to use a lot of do-dads on the cards that I won't put into my scrapbook albums.

This first card was inspired by Miss Mary's handmade card that she sent me which you can see in my post Visions of dead flowers, broken chocolate and a hand made card. Mary's card is much nicer but I used the same technique (at least I think it's the same). First I used a roller stamp and then added color with coordinating stamps. (Mary did hers on white paper, I used yellow) I then cut the stamped strip and then mounted onto a wider strip of turquoise paper and mounted that onto the card. I added a button with ribbon. I stamped "simply said from the heart - thank you" on the lower right hand side and then stamped coordinating flowers on the envelope. I tried and tried to get the lighting to turn out better on this card... the pink is almost right but the yellow is much prettier in person. Oh well, at least I have a sample to show you:


On this card I stamped the large flower directly onto the card. The card is made of textured paper so the texture showed up when I stamped the flower. I really liked the effect. The stamp includes the lop-sided circles inside of it. I thought it was quite boring with just plain white inside the flower so I stamped just the circles onto printed paper and then cut it out and adhered it into the center of the flower. I thought it was kind of clever if I do say so myself. ;-) On the left side I have a strip of pink paper, I tore it on the right side, adhered some ribbon onto it and then pierced the holes along the torn side. I stamped the little "hello" and the stem of the flower. I then stamped the set of 3 flowers onto the back of the envelope in the same pink as the flower on the card.