Archives for Homemade Cards

Craft with Heart Cards Modified with No Limits

by CraftyAmanda in Close to My Heart | 1 Comment

The Craft with Heart (CWH) card kit is great. If you assemble them following the directions that come in the kit, you will have 24 cards that cost less than $1.85 per card (yearly subscription). How great is that?

If you fall in love with the patterns on the card bases, you can do what I did and cut them apart and make many more cards adding your own supplies. For one set of the cards (the kit makes two of 12 different cards), I limited the supplies when making the first half to items I think most crafters will have on hand. See the first set of slightly modified cards here.

For the second set of 12 cards, I decided I was not going to limit myself and just create. Sometimes the mojo works with me, other times it doesn’t. This time, I truly enjoyed the process of creating these cards.

I got all these from the first card base! I added some cricut cuts, (pink flower, leaf & greenery) Silver and outdoor denim Cardstock. I did pull out my scrap envelops and pulled some of the matting colors from that.

Cards 2-5 didn’t call to me like some of the others, so I just added some more embellishments (cricut cuts, hearts, sprays of leaves. . . ) and silver cardstock for a wow factor.

The card on the left is very close to the original card #6 in the kit instructions, but by cutting back of the base off, I was able to create two more cards.

I absolutely loved the leaves on card base 7 and I had to cut the back off of the card base and stretch it to make multiple cards. (I also went back and cut it off the back from the original slightly modified set too!) As you can see I really had some fun playing with Cricut cuts, die cuts, embossing folders, silver cardstock matting, punches and more. The blue plaid paper was a scrap from another base (10?).

Here are the last few No-Limits CWH cards. (Cards 8-12) I truly enjoyed playing with my tools, using up scraps, and just going for it.

Hope you find some time to add some crafting joy to your day!

Using up Scraps – Freeform

by CraftyAmanda in Artwork, Cards, Close to My Heart, Cricut, CTMH, Stamping, Technique, Video | 2 Comments

I had a big pile of scraps left from my Christmas cards and started creating some cards from the pieces. At first I did a few and then decided I needed some flowers for embellishing. So I cut 20 flowers in blue belle, sapphire and whites daisy. I used my cricut to fussy cut the flower from the old Chelsea Gardens stamp. (C1709) Then to finalize the flowers I stamped them with embossing ink and heat embossed them with gold powder.

So now that I had a bowl of flowers I could dive into creating some cards.

The branches and gold leaves are all from the leftovers too. If you like watching process videos, here’s mine from these cards.

Happy Crafting!

CWH All cards finished

by CraftyAmanda in Artwork, Cards, Close to My Heart, Craft With Heart Subscription, Cricut, CTMH, Stamping, Technique, Video, Workshop On the Go | 1 Comment

Less than $1.85 per card including tax and shipping for the yearly subscription is an a amazing deal. That doesn’t include any bonus cards or the stamp set, block & ink! Here are cards 3-12 plus the 3 bonus cards I made with a brief description of what I did to create the cards.

Card #3

All I did on card #3 was stylus emboss the big heart, one of the little hearts & curved the petals on the green flower. I used foam tape under the hearts above the sentiment. I also stamped the leaves under the green flower head.

Card #4

Card Number four was kicked up a notch with a couple of pink leaves and a palm branch. Splattered the sentiment base with the pink shimmer brush and added some sequence along with stylus embossing the foliage & flower.

Card #5

I added some fern color stars from the circles of stars along with palm brand and a peach flower head to card #5. Glitzed it up a bit with the clear shimmer brush too.

Card #6

Adding some second generation stamped leaves and a few of the cricut cuts was all Card #6 needed.

Card #7

I gave all the pre-cut die images from one card to the other card, and added all stars from the cricut cuts. Sprinkle in a few sequences and cards #7 are done.

Card #8

A couple of blue belle palm branches and a blue belle and white flower head joined a folded in half white leaf to complete cards #8. (Sprinkled with a few sequences too.)

Card #9

In the chaos of moving from room to room, one of the blue houses was lost for Card #9. Add a few sequences and rotate the 2nd card and it’s done.

Card #10

I took both of the pre-printed card bases and cut them in half. I added 2 white card bases and added the front panel on them. The flowers on the branch are not pre-printed, so I found a flower stamp and used the center to turn the blank die-cuts into flowers. (The other 2 panels will be used in the bonus cards later.)

Card #11

Card #11 was straight foward. Some stylus embossing on the flowers and palm branch, add some foam tape for dimension and sprinkle with a few sequences.

Card #12

I put all the yellow stars with one card base and added pink & white to the other card base. Sprinkle a few tiny silver stars and both cards should be well received.

Bonus Card #1

Rounding the corners from one of the wood card panels cut from Card #10, I then cut the sunflowers off of the notecard from Jeannette Lynton and added a foam taped sentiment. You can see a few of the petals were outlined with the clear shimmer brush.

Bonus Card #2

The sentiment also came from the notecard from Jeannette Lynton and so I added some of the left over palm branches and white leaves along with a great flower head for fun.

Bonus Card #3

This last card I took the last woodgrain panel from card #10 and made a cluster of flowers and leaves that were left over from the set of cricut images I added to this subscription kit.

If you didn’t see the Cricut Image set in the previous post. Here it is. All the images come from the Flower Market cartridge and I used 4 half sheets of 12×12 in blue belle, peach, fern & white daisy.

Happy Crafting!

Sept Club Cards

by CraftyAmanda in Artwork, Cards, Close to My Heart, Cricut, CTMH, Stamping, Technique, Video | Leave a comment

This is one of the cards my free monthly club gals will be making in Sept 2020. If you would like to join the fun, come check us out at Crafting with Amanda VIP Group on face.

You might be tired of seeing iterations of the same distress oxide card, but it’s so quick that I was able to create and assemble 16 of them in less than an hour. Each crafter that qualified and signed up to receive the Sept card kit opened an envelope that had these things in it.

There are enough pieces here to create 2 bridge cards and we get to do some old fashioned coloring! I don’t know about you, but that just helps me relax.

https://youtu.be/O-XX4VkvLXM

The video walks you through the process I used to create a bridge card. There are so many ways to create this card and they have such a wow impact to the receiver.

Hope you can find some crafting time in your world today!

Distress Oxides – Learning

by CraftyAmanda in About Me, Artwork, Cards, Close to My Heart, CTMH, Stamping, Technique, Video | Leave a comment

I have long admired those paper artists that are able to pull off mixed media or the grunge look and create something incredible. I struggle to put layer upon layer and hide most of what I did previously and I think because of that I miss the mark with these art forms.

There are ladies that create amazing cards with ink blended backgrounds and I have tried and I have been able to teach others, but my own work did not soar as others did. All that being said, I think Distress Oxides just might enable me to do some creating of my own!

Learning new techniques is a passion of mine and I have been told I dive into with scientific methods. So of course the first thing I did before even opening one of the distress oxide ink pads was to do some research. I watched youTube videos, read what Tim Holtz had to say about the ink and talked to my oldest child who is an artist.

Knowledge in hand, I dug out some paper, tools and a few different mediums to learn how this hybrid die and pigment ink, that reacts with water, would act with different preparations of papers.

I had received a nice set of watercolors for Christmas along with a Watercolor Ground. So I took the ground, borrowed a jar of Gesso from my in house artist and under the recommendation of my eldest grabbed a bottle of basic white acrylic paint. Taking these three mediums, I went about applying a thin layer to 3 different types of white cardstock. The YouTube video goes into more details.

I learned a lot. First, the watercolor ground prepares cardstock to be able to withstand water-coloring and allow more playing with the colors before the paper starts to pill and gives a nice texture to the regular cardstock. It does not however create a good environment for trying to achieve smooth ink blending as the texture works against that. The Gesso and the Acrylic paint however both made blending the inks easier and I felt like if I can do it, anyone can. Plain cardstock wasn’t as easy to get a seamless blend, but I did manage it.

Now that I had played with the distress oxides ink, it was time to see what water did to it, and then find ways to apply the water in different patterns. The card at the very top of this post is my favorite. I sprayed the back of a stencil and pressed it on the inked cardstock. You can see the details and I really like it. I feel it could be a gateway to adding more textures and layers.

I even got out my crimper to add some texture behind the feature imagine. If I would have thought of it, I should have ripped the crimped cardstock to really kick it up a notch! Maybe next time.

Here’s another card I did. I pulled matting cardstock and the stripe of yellow for the background along with the black cardstock scrap to balance the stamping of the flowers. This is one of the samples that was sprayed with water and created all the faded water marks.

I’m looking forward to creating more inked backgrounds and finding new color combination. What is your favorite thing to do with distress oxides? I would love to try another new technique!

Happy Crafting!

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