January Card Club - Card #3 - handmade paper flowers with a paper pierced frame

 For our last card I chose to make these quick and easy flowers from handmade paper which I made quite a while back.  I tore squares from four different paper of the same colour family and then tore two leaves from two rectangles of green and center from yellow.  The circles look best if they are not perfect and the same with the leaves so it is a very forgiving process.  We used my pattern tracing wheel and a ruler to create a row of paper pierced holes on all four sides of the card fronts.  We could have added faux stitching with a marker instead.  Once the circles were created we simply glued them to each other starting with the largest and finishing with the yellow center.  We auditioned our flowers with their leaves, made adjustments until we were happy and glued them into place on our card front!!  Done!!  A very elegant card that can be used for a variety of occasions!!!  It was very nice to see my friends again and to spend an evening creating cards with them!!!  Therese

January Card Club - Card #2 - two papers, four rectangles and creative focal element

 For our second card I chose two coordinating papers (3 7/8" x 5 1/8"), stacked them and then cut them.  This gave me backgrounds for two cards!!  The rectangles were adhered to coordinating card fronts.  The ladies were very creative with their cards and arranged their paper very differently and did not necessarily use all of them.  I had provided each kit with two focal elements - one that featured a heart ( Valentine's Day) and one that was more all occasion.  You can see that I made up one with a little hedge hog with a bunch of flowers.  I watercoloured the image and layered it onto a green cardstock square which was distressed on the edges.  I mounted this image onto my card front using 3D foam tape.  The green and red one has a layered focal element - paper pierced scallop (SU), circle punchie (SU) and a die cut heart (CB).  The third one has another watercoloured coffee cup layered onto a scallop circle (Nestibilities).  I could have put the slim one on the left instead and would have had a bit of a different look and I could have used a landscape orientation to change it up a bit more.  Lots of options!!!  Therese

January Card Club - Card #1 - printed transparencies, hand decorated papers and brads

It was time again to make cards with my friends.  We made Christmas cards in November.  You can check them out here, here and here.   I really enjoy the creative process of inventing cards  - figuring out sketches, picking supplies with a variety of themes and colours and then putting together the kits.  For our first kit I chose to print up some images on transparency which I have done in the past but not for a really long time. The images - Eiffel Tower - Brenda Braun, basket - Arthur's Clipart,  car - Clker, bird - Clipart.   I auditioned these images on a variety of preprinted decorative papers with not much success so I dug out my box of hand decorated papers and that worked much better.  These papers were created for special projects or whenever I had extra paint leftover.  I just painted it on white paper or over something that still needed " a bit of something".  Lots of fun!!!!  So for the first card with the Eiffel tower I layered a piece of paste paper over a watercolour background and then laid my transparency over it and added the four brads to keep it in place.  I added this large focal element to a coordinating blue card.  The same process was used for all the other cards.  I love the look of the dark blue behind the flower basket which was a distressed look using the crackle technique.  The one under the car worked out so well because the dark section works perfectly as the shadow of the card.  The greens and blues in the paper behind the bird makes it look right at home.  For the bird and the flowers I added colour on the back of the image with markers to highlight parts of the image.  Really helps the images look real and in context!!!  Therese