May Card Club - Card #3 - fun little trees made with the chevron punch over some funky word patterned paper

For our third card we assembled these fun cards!!  Wanting to use my chevron punch I had done an internet search to see what others had created.  I found these fun little trees which were trimmed from green cardstock strips (1.25" wide) which were punched repeatedly or not using the punch.  The pieces created with mixed up and reinserted into openings in trees of different colours.  The tops and bottoms were trimmed to give them their tree shape and the little trunks were fashioned from scraps of brown cardstock.  We embossed our trees to give them some texture and little more character.  We tore our background paper into two pieces and adhered them to our light colour card fronts.  Added our trees and then their trunks.  We generally added 3D foam to at least one of them for a bit of dimension.  As a final touch we added a yellow moon (1")!!  Done!  Everyone liked this interesting and different take on trees!!  It was a fun evening and fortunately a beautiful evening.  Several just walked home as they live close by!!  No cardmaking sessions this summer though we may have a creative gathering to make some handmade paper!!  Therese

 

May Card Club - Card #2 - dryer sheet flowers over handmade paper

For our second card we played with making flowers using used dryer sheets!!!!  So fun!!  I have made some of these before but on a smaller scale on these cards.  After ironing (low) them smooth I cut the dryer sheet to approximately 3" x 4" rectangles - a sheet into four pieces.  We folded them in half along the length and then then three times across the new length.  Next, we folded that sandwich in half with the fold at the bottom.  We then trimmed the top with all the single edges into a nice round shape starting at about half way up the side and finishing at about half way on the opposite side which creates the petals.  It is only one option - they could be skinny, pointy, wavy, etc. as petals on flower can be very many different shapes.    We opened up the sandwich to be flat again and gathered the width in the center and tied it off in the middle with thread.  We then coloured our flowers to coordinate with our handmade paper backgrounds.  They got very wet so I had the heat gun setup on LOW so we could dry them before we went to the next step.  It is possible to colour them flat but it is harder to estimate what they will look like!!  We added a gold brad to a coloured flower sequin and inserted the brad into a hole in the center which we had made with a push pin.  We used the push pin to make a hole in our background as well and installed the flower.  To finish off the flower we hand cut a stem and leaves from scraps of green cardstock.  Once they were glued into place we adhered this large element to our card fronts.  Therese

 

May Card Club - Card #1 - bright punchies, white seam binding over an embossed grid

It was so great to see everyone again!!!  We started our creative cardmaking session with this card which features little punched shapes - flowers, butterflies, leaves, hearts, etc.  I punched these from glossy paper which had been coloured with ink pads by tapping the pad on a piece of plastic packaging, spritzing water on the ink and the placing the piece of glossy card into the puddle.  Totally fun and unpredictable but always fabulous decorative paper for creating with!!!  I decided on a grid for the punchies so I used a plaid embossing folder and cut the white cardstock to be just the size I needed for 12 space with a border all the way around.  We added white seam binding to the middle strip of squares, added a short piece and then installed at square brad to keep everything in place.  Easier said than done but we got it done!!!  We added the shapes any where we wanted on the remaining space - generally in the remaining squares.  We did add a bit of detail to our shapes with glitter pens just to give them some character.   

I finished the top five cards with butterflies and flowers and will be adding these to my stash of cards for IWIN.  The fall will come sooner than we think and it is fun to add cards as I create others as they then all have different looks which makes it easier to suit the people who will be receiving them.  

Therese