I have made a bunch of cards recently, most of them over the weekend. At first, I was just cutting and taping away with cardstock and scrapbook paper, relying heavily on the beauty of the embellished papers to carry the impact of the card. I made a couple of sets, which I am selling in my Etsy store. Here are some pics:

Girlie Girl Cards

To make these, you will need:

embellished 12×12 paper – something embossed, metallic or glittered

matching 8.5 x 11 cardstock and a few coordinating colored and white scraps

punches – one scalloped, one smaller oval

rubber stamps with sentiments and some ink

Blue Butterfly Cards

coordinating ribbon

embellishments – brads, sequins, etcs

adhesive (double-sided tape)

1. Cut cardstock in half width-wise. Fold each half in half again to form two cards, 4.25 x 5.5 inches. Set aside.

2. Cut embellished paper into pieces that measure 4 x 5.25 inches.

3. Decide where to place ribbon – in the corners, across the bottom or top or running down the sides. Cut ribbon to fit and adhere in place on back of paper. Adhere embellished paper to cardstock.

4. Cut a scalloped edged oval from a coordinating scrap. Cut a plain oval from a white scrap. Stamp sentiment on white scrap; mount scrap on scalloped oval. If desired, decorate oval with brads, sequins, or other embellishments. Mount sentiment onto card.

5. Further embellish the card with glitter, sequins, beads, etc in a manner keeping with the original design of the paper.

Girlie Girl detail

So I made a couple of sets of those. Okay – four different ones over the last week or so. Like I have nothing better to do. Sigh.

Then something inspired me to dig through my rather large collection of rubber stamps. I haven’t really done much rubber stamping lately – mostly, I have restricted my rubberstamping to the sentiments on the cards, as in the examples above. But once I began poking through my drawers of rubber stamps, I was reminded why I was attracted to the craft in the first place: the possibilities of color and design are almost limitless. But also overwhelming – which can stop you in your creative tracks, if you let it. I could kind of feel that coming on, so I decided to pick one stamp and do one fairly simple design. Here’s the finished product:

Medallion birthday card

That got the juices going. So I dug through another drawer marked “Asian” and found a beautiful stamp I bought from Judikins years ago. More than a year ago, I made up some basic cards after I bought the “Far East” scrapbook pad at a craft store. Suddenly, the pieces came together. Here are the cards:

Purple Geisha Card

Very simple, yet full of impact, no? These cards measure 4.5 x 6 inches. For the medallion, I stamped the image with clear embossing ink and heat embossed it with a powder called “verdigris.” It’s a mix of teal and gold – like tarnished copper. For the Geisha, I stamped the image with Color Box black, heat embossed it with clear embossing powder and then decorated the image with lavender glitter glue. I mounted it on coordinating lavender cardstock, punched two holes at the bottom for two silver brads and mounted the whole thing on the base card with dimensional mounting tape. I love it! I’ll have these for sale in my individual card basket for $3.00 each when I do my next craft show in Oct.

Medallion detail

Purple Geisha detail