Intermission

I'm starting to get bored on posting all these ancient cards here. I'd so much want to move to the present than wallow in the past but, on the other hand, I want to archive all those cards I've been making. Somehow I feel that I can't move on until I've gone through with the past. Oh bother, I guess there's nothing more to it than just keep on posting those cards... It feels funny to post about zillion times a day (well, not that many, to be honest...), but the quicker I post these ancient cards, the quicker I get to other things.

When I first started blogging... OK, when I first really started blogging I wasn't going to post anything but the finished projects. But now I think there might also be some general what's-going-on posts coming up. Not a diary or anything like that, I've never been comfortable or able to keep a diary but something according to that line. We'll see.

I sometimes feel funny writing these posts, like talking to myself. Although I do constatly talk to myself (to the point of seeming quite mad), I find it odd to do so in writing. I wonder if someone actually reads this. It would be nice to have readers, but then again I don't want to be "too social". It's hard to balance with the wish to be part of a community and the wish to remain an outsider...

Happy Birthday, Sys!

My little sister (somehow calling a 12-year-old as a baby sister seems really odd, it's not like she's anywhere near a baby! Well, she's not that small either...) had a phase when she loved wolves. So when I bought her a book on them as a present, I naturally wanted to make the card to fit the theme.


I cut the card blank from a handmade cardstock with black wood chips (or something similar). In my opinion it looks just like snow scattered with spruce needles. I cut the wolf photo from the back cover of my previous year's calendar, it was just the right size for the card and nice and heavy and glossy, like a real photo. My first idea was to mat it centrally onto a square of blue paper, but when the photo just happened to twitch from its original accurate position, I liked the "scattered" look better. It's actually a lot harder to place things haphazardly than according to some regular design and achieve a natural look.

To balance the bottom half of the card, I took a round blue pre-die-cut (now that's definitely not a word!) tag, but it didn't look quite right. I inked the edges, but it wasn't enough so I mounted the tag onto a piece of silver gift wrap and cut out the excess, leaving a thin border. The tag alone couldn't balance the bigger squares on the upper half, so I took a piece of blue ribbon left over from gift-wrapping, cut slits with craft knife to the tag and threaded the ribbon through them. I mounted the tag with a foam pad, but I don't have the faintest idea what I did to the ribbon ends as the card is one-sided... I guess I glued a panel of plain paper on the back of the card (I guess you can't call it an insert as there's no inside...). The peel-off numbers were actually in italics but I didn't want them that way, so I twisted them a bit when mounting and got this funnily wonky 12.

Congrats for granny

No ideas and a card needed in a rush, in other words business as usual. Luckily I still had these card blanks, the flourish in the corner glams the card up without an elaborate design. Although I consider peel-off greeting and a 3D-picture to be a boring design option, I used it here because it was the easy way out. Luckily this flower fairy was a bit easier than some, with no fussing with fairy boots or other tricky tiny bits. To emphasise the flourish, I glued a piece of lilac silk paper underneath it and trimmed the edge with a peel-off border.

Time flies...

Oh dear, it seems that my addiction to words and puns is getting worse. Please excuse me, I just can't help myself. And I'm afraid that the worst puns are still to come... Aren't butterflies flies as well? (Although I'm not sure whether these critters are butterflies.)

A surprisingly simple birthday card and also one-sided, which is not usual for me. The blots on the violet (the colours are a bit on the blue side) patterned paper just begged to be stamped upon, so who was I to argue? To keep the card at least gender-neutral (if not masculine), I chose the doodled insect stamp, I'm not sure whether I used blue or lilac ink.

In thruth, the strip of striped paper would have looked better if placed a bit to the left, but I let the insects to decide. A blue and a white skeleton leaves and the recipient's age in peel-offs provided the finishing touches.

A wedding quickie

I needed a card for my friend's wedding and I needed it fast, so I didn't have time to mull over every decision for 15 minutes like I normally do.



I took a lightly ribbed cream card blank with precut apertures and glued a piece of deep red rose-patterned cardstock on the reverse. I stuck three golden heart stickers in the middle of the apertures, and as the card was still lacking something I attached snippets of a peel-off scroll border between the apertures. For a bit of added luxury, I matched the envelope with the card with a punched square of the same patterned cardstock and a heart sticker.

I made one mistake with this card: I "neatened" the edges of the patterned cardstock (at least it was solid red and not patterned) on the inside of the card blank with peel-off scroll border. It would have been better to cover it with an insert.

A tired knitter

We had a small knitting circle among friends (although we tended to concentrate even more on chatting), so when I was making a birthday card for one of them, this kitten stamp was perfect for it.


My first idea was to emboss the kitty with black but the stamp proved to be too detailed for it and the result was far from satisfactory. Then I tried clear embossing powder, with even poorer results. So I gave up on the whole idea of embossing and stamped the kitty with VersaMark on blue handmade paper. I decided to highlight the ball of yarn with red but left the kitty as it was. I took 15x15 cm square of corrugated card for card blank to give the card some texture. As I wanted the card to have a needlecraft feel to it, I selected papers with cloth-like patterns and cut pieces from them. I tried to arrange them like they had been haphazardly thrown on a table (looking the card now, I think the red piece should've been higher and a bit more angled, and I probably should've inked the papers' edges). I glued the stamped kitty on top of the papers and added the text strips with Dymo .

Cheery frogs

I'm not very good at using up the leftover scraps from my projects, although I'm very good in hoarding them (it seems my scrap boxes get bigger and bigger). Here's one card where I tried to make use of the little bits and pieces.

I took a bookmark-sized piece of white corrugated card as the base and glued a bit smaller panel of light green handmade paper on it. I punched two squares from yellow paper and fixed frog stickers on them. I stuck a piece of green gingham ribbon on the card and fixed the frogs on it with foam pads. The card needed still something, so I put small peel-off flowers on the ribbon to balance the design.

Gardener's delight

When I was trying to find excuses to make cards, my friend said that I could make her a birthday card. As her birthday was two months away, she forgot all about it. I didn't.

As the birthday girl was a keen gardener, I wanted the card to reflect this. I have a tendency to hoard napkins although I seldom make any use of them, so I grabbed the opportunity to do that. I glued a napkin with all sorts of gardening related pictures on white card with spray adhesive. Then I cut out the motives I wanted: a row of pots, wellies, watering cans, and a straw hat. I cut out another set of wellies and water cans for a bit of 3D decoupage.

I used another of my problematic photo aperture card blanks. To add a few flowers to my garden theme, I backed the aperture with a piece of flowered vellum. I glued the wellies on the vellum and perched the straw hat on top of them with a foam pad. The hat needed a feminine touch, so I took a bit of pink embroidery floss and tied it into a bow.

To break the strict lines of the photo aperture, I fixed the watering cans on its bottom right corner. The frame still seemed to lack something, so I cut out the blue butterfly and attached it on the upper left corner to balance the design. Finally, I used the row of pots to edge the envelope and to match it with the card.

Say it with flowers

I made this card for my mother's birthday. Having come up with this nice gift wrap and knowing my mother's fancy for gerberas, this was an easy card to make. I rather like its bold colours.


I stamped the daisy with VersaMark and embossed it with gold embossing powder. To frame and highlight the stamped image, I backed it with a square of red cardstock. Because the gift wrap was so bold, I decided to cool things off with a dose of white. Instead of sticking the gift wrap straight on the red card blank (hot, hot, hot, and "messy", too), I glued it first on white paper. I cut of the excess, leaving a thin white border, and stuck the panel on the base. I used foam pads to fix the stamped image to the card and to give it a bit of dimension.

Spring Greetings

When I got a bunch of card bases with photo apertures from a craft kit, I was puzzled what to do with them as I'm not at all comfortable using photos in cards. Luckily, I found them a perfect companion for small 3D-pictures, here a set of primroses. To soften the look and to add some colour, I backed the aperture with light yellow paper and stamped flowers across the card base with matching ink.