Welcome to The Cherry On Top's Traditional Tuesday.
Christmas is like 16 weekends away, I think. That gives us plenty of time to make our own cards for the occasion. I only send out about 10 cards, so this is totally doable. Not everyone gets a home made card. That, I don't have time for. Hehehe...Think who on your "Good" list should get a hand made creation and start scrapping.
Fortunately, I have all of my Christmas stuff apart from the rest of my scrappy stuff. I do organise a little bit. Hehehe...For the first time since last year, I could dive into the Christmas goodies! Yay! I really love scrapping Christmas and winter almost as much as Halloween, school and summer. Am I missing something? Hehehe...I'm an addict, what can I say?
Today's card you can whip up before lunch. Unfortunately, the only space with enough room to hold all of my crafty things, is the attic and it's beginning to get hot up there. Not at all typical for Belgium and certainly NOT good for your crafty supplies. The extreme hot and cold is not at all ideal.
At The Cherry, we are into scrapping a LOT. We're proud of keeping the environment an important element in our projects and most of our creations are made inexpensively, quickly and easily. Today's project is no exception. So, let's get scrappy!
Design, up cycle or recycle a box to hold your cards. This is a recycled gift box from honey products, I believe. It will hold just about any size card I'll design.
Here is just a tiny portion of the goodies I thought I'd work with. Take note of the card in the background. That will be my card's base. It's a very rigid card, with one of the inside panels blank. Really an ideal card to recycle.
There's the inside. Plenty of room to reform this card.
Let's look at the cover. I liked the green and white background of the original card, so I'm just going to place these two pieces of scrap over the top, in the opposite colour direction from the card. It will add balance and if the green scrap is not perfect, it won't matter because it doesn't lie directly on it.
See what I mean?
Tip: Keep adhesive in mind when sending cards via the post. I'll be sending cards to Florida and Pennsylvania. That means doubling up on adhesive and using a variety of adhesives as well. I've found that glue dots are really great for most temperatures. So use those anywhere you can. Quality adhesive is recommended.
My green didn't work with my original grouping of stuff I thought I would use, so I went with a different group where the green fit better. Check out those prices?! Under 2 Euros for the pad of paper and borders. Just purchased at a discount store a few years ago. My mom sent me these nifty gift tags, but we'll be dismantling those, too. Keep reading to see what we do with them.
Tip: Before you even begin gathering supplies, have an arsenal of sketches and at least an idea of what kind of basic layout you want to have. It will save a lot of time. I've got hundreds of sketches for cards and scrapbook layouts on our Pinterest boards, Cards and Sketches. I recently Pinned nearly a dozen of really good ones.
As you can see from the first image, I went with a woven look for my strips of paper. I never tried this before so I'll explain how I worked with the adhesive because I was a bit perplexed in the beginning. I took one of my papers and cut strips in varying sizes and played until I liked the layout, then adhered them. I didn't need to weave at the right of the layout so I put most of my adhesive there and used my tiniest width double sided tape for the left side and started my vertical strip just to the right of that strip.
Then I used my favourite method of getting liquid adhesive under my paper. Take some scrap lining from your double sided tape. It's slippery, the glue won't stick to it and it won't stick to whatever it is you want to glue down. Put a drop of your liquid adhesive on the tip of your scrap and gently slide it under where you want it to stick. So easy, right?!
Weave over and under and the opposite for your next strip, under and over.
If you want to save mega time or your not good at placing sticker alphas or you don't like your handwriting, check out what we did to get around all of that.
In my green, blank square, I chose this circular "Christmas Wishes" embellishment from those tags. I placed it towards the bottom of the green square and made it look like an ornament by adding ribbon in just the right places.
One flat strip from under the circle to the top of the card. Take a small piece of coordinating ribbon, tie a knot in the middle, clip your edges of the ribbon at an angle and adhere just under the circle. I even had some nifty Christmas ribbon.
The music note strip was actually a sticker, but I didn't use the sticker side. I just cut it out leaving the backing so my strips would still go underneath.
Now, we have to look at the inside of the card. I've taken another card where the image matched lovely with the outside of my card. Pretty good, right? Same colours. Even the same kind of style.
At first I was bummed because the inside sentiment was really nice and I thought I might be able to use it for another card. Then I noticed the card came in layers. I took my scissors in-between and could separate the layers without ruining any other part. Major score!
I also didn't feel like hand writing, coming up with some nice sentiment nor did I feel like using stickers so...I went through my bag of cards and found a nice saying that fit on my card size and colour wise. See...Of course, I kept the rest of the card in case I'll need it for another project.
How nice is the inside of our card? Our clipped out picture and sentiment from two other cards, backed on some more coordinating paper and adhered to cover up the previous sentiment and signatures. I had to plop that flake in there because I got a messy smudge that grew progressively worse with each rub. Hehehe...
We used all older supplies we had on hand and mostly scraps and recycled cards for one, really nice Christmas card made with love and under 30 minutes. Hehehe...No moe excuses that you need time and money to get scrappy.
We've got a few cards on our blog. We just made this hybrid card on Saturday and it's free. Click on the image to get the download and check out our tutorial. You could use the search field at the top right of the blog and do a "card" search to see all we have.
Thanks so much for checking out The Cherry.
Happy crafting!