Further Experimentation in Papercrafts

It's been decided. I've become the designated thank-you-card-maker for my club. They all liked the last one so much, they decided I should make another for our speaker at the next meeting.

Now, I've always liked making my own greeting cards. I feel like handmade cards are such a nice touch. This probably stems from Girl Scout days when we had an actual Stampin' Up! party/demonstration as one of our troop meetings. Rubber stamps were the thing back then and I remember making thank you cards for all my teachers at the end of the school year. They were suitably impressed with my young crafting skills.

My crafting supplies are seriously limited with me living at school, so I make do with a few essential items. Some of the other stuff, like cardstock and paints, come from the college's art club supplies, of which I am the president :P But really, my X-acto knife is my best friend and one of the few crafting supplies I keep at my house here.

I was at a bit of a loss for inspiration when trying to make this card. I was rummaging through a box of art club supplies and found these card blanks with embossed flower pattern on the front. You could hardly tell it was embossed though. Good enough to start with, at least it wasn't from scratch. I cut out the flowers and stems with my knife, but left some spaces like between the flower and the stem to preserve some of the card's structural integrity since all of the cut out spaces were smack dab in the middle of the card. I cut out some white cardstock/art paper to fit the inside front panel (I miss my paper cutter! One of the few crafting tools I failed to bring here with me). Brushed on a nice peachy color behind the flowers and a green behind the stems, watered down for a paler color. The nice part about this is you don't have to be exact about where the color goes and so you don't get those icky "edge" lines in your painting, just a nice wash of color. I also took a fine tipped paintbrush and white paint and painted in the flower details (petal creases? stamens?) Finally, I faked my way through a calligraphy-looking "thanks" with the same fine tipped brush and white acrylic paint.

And there you have it. Not too shabby for a quick, thrown together kind of card. The cutting does get tedious though especially with the rounded shape of the petals.

And of course, I've got crafter's eye. I noticed all of the imperfections and didn't really want to give the card to the speaker because it didn't quite live up to my expectations of how I wanted it to turn out. I smudged the paint between the "a" and the "n" and there were weird glue stick residuals in random places and the cardstock wasn't the perfect size and the green wasn't dark enough in the end and I really botched up the name on the envelope (the handwriting, not the name!) and the list goes on. But it's all good.

The Details:
Pre-made card blank from Michael's
Dafont.com - Jellyka font

Lots of other WIPs to be finished soon and hopefully photographed before I send them off to be donated.