Tanya Fox, editor, and Brooke Smith, managing editor, are the editorial team behind CardMaker magazine. When not reviewing design submissions and planning future issues of the magazine and pattern books, they can often be found exploring websites for inspiration and visiting their favorite local coffee shop.
They hope you’ll visit the blog often as they share card-making tips, designer features, paper-crafting techniques, project inspiration and a peek at life inside the CardMaker office.
Hi all, AJ here to share with you my U Inspire Me card for today! When using photos as inspiration, I tend to take elements from them, mostly colors, to incorporate into my design. I love colors for a starting point!!
I saw this photo somewhere while browsing color combos and this one spoke to me! I love the colors together and figured I could do something with them.
To start, I liberally inked up a piece of white cardstock with the Kaleidacolor ink pad in Vineyard. I then die-cut several different-sized circles from various places of the inked cardstock to catch the contrast of colors. I popped up the circles with foam squares and adhered my stamped sentiment!
Try browsing color combos on google and check out the fun inspiration that pops up!
It’s always fun to look back on older issues of CardMaker magazine and see how other talented designers worked their magic. I’m always inspired in some way that gives me an idea or sparks something new. Today I found a pretty spring card by Laura Ann Williams that I thought I’d give my own touch to. This card originally appeared in the March 2009 issue of CardMaker.
The fresh spring palette on this card caught my eye right away. I love the acid green and the pink patterned paper together, and I am always drawn to tulips. I especially love how she stamped off some of the tulips to create a background.
Here’s my re-creation of the design to make it my own.
I love how Laura Ann used colored ink and then her pencils to create a very soft look for the main image, which I sponged and mounted on sanded designer paper just like the original. I too stamped in soft green ink, but then used my Copic® markers to give these tulips life. The no-line look is so popular right now. I also did the stamping off of the tulips in my design, but added a layer, changed up the rickrack for some rosette ribbon, and instead of the stamped flourishes along the lower left edge, I added text stamped from the same set.
I wanted to have some dainty embellishing so I added some buttons and iridescent twine to finish it off.
See how easy it is to be inspired by what’s in the CardMaker archives? It’s a great starting point for your creativity today!
One of the most basic tips I follow myself and can give to others is having elements repeat themselves on your card to really pull the design together. You can do this with a combination of stamps, die cuts and embellishments that are similar in shape, or the same color. Often when a design is okay, but not great, I pick out a few things that are already in my design that can be repeated with the addition of a new image or material in some way to pump up the volume!
On this card, the die-cut white circle for the focal point works with the repeating circles in the background. The tiny diamonds and cut outs in the circles’ centers, with the yellow base showing through, coordinate with the tiny, individual panes in the butterfly’s wings.
And if you look closely, the subtle geometric shape of a black butterfly is repeated again and again where the rings of each background circle meet in the pattern. See the wings? Imagine a body in between. :) Around and around, I love how this card turned out!
I often use buttons and a few round gems when I have circles in my design. Similarly, focal points with lots of angles look great paired with lots of clean lines on your mats and patterned papers.
Supplies used: Pure Luxury sweet corn and white cardstock, Pretty Patterns 2, Master Butterfly and Garden Silhouettes stamp sets, Pretty Patterns 2 Rings and Herringbone Silhouette Studio cut file, and black onyx ink pad from Gina K Designs; Copic® markers (Y15 and Y17) from Imagination International Inc.; Stardust pen from Sakura; Cutter Bee scissors from EK Success; Grand Calibur® machine and Standard Circles SM die templates (#S4-116) from Spellbinders™ Paper Arts; 3D White Foam Squares from Scrapbook Adhesives by 3L™.
Thanks for reading today! I hope this helps you design when you are planning a card or find that your design still needs a little something!
We have another exciting blog hop today! We’re partnering up with the design team from Flourishes spotlighting some of their brand-new stamps. You’re sure to be inspired from start to finish with this hop! We want to say “thank you” to Flourishes for supplying everyone with all of the fun images you’ll see on the hop.
As soon as I saw the new Call Me stamp set, I immediately thought of the hit song “Call Me, Maybe” and decided to use that as inspiration to create a bright, colorful and sparkly card. It’s perfect for all of the girly girls!
To make this hop extra fun, Flourishes is holding a giveaway on their blog of their entire May release valued at more than $70! That’d be pretty exciting to win!
Everybody loves a good sale, especially one where items like paper-crafting books and products are discounted up to60% off ! The Annie’s Spring Cleaning Clearance SALE is going on right now. You’ll find products such as Elmer’s adhesives, various stamps, fine-point pens, the Sew Easy stitching tool and more. There are 700+ products on SALE! Here are some of our favorite paper-crafting books you can purchase at a discounted price now, but remember that quantities are limited and when they are gone, they are gone.
Inch your way to a beautiful gift this week! The theme for this week’s Card Challenge Corner is Little Gift and we are challenging you to create a gift using Inchie squares. This can be anything you’d like it to be as long as you can sit or hang the project somewhere. Some ideas are a mobile, a mosaic, a collage, a name sampler, etc. This could be a great opportunity to make a personalized gift for a graduate in your life! Photos of your creations are always welcomed on the CardMaker Facebook page.
*Find full instructions for the card shown above in our Spring 2013 issue!
It’s no secret that I am obsessed with texture! Texture can often take a card from “something’s missing” to “that’s perfect.” I love to use embossing folders to add texture to my cards. Though there are MANY great ways to use your embossing folders, today I want to share two of the basics.
For my first card, I could have left the green panel plain, but then my card would have been just that. Since it is a very plain and simple card to begin with, I needed a little something to add a bit of interest. I simply inserted the green panel into my embossing folder and sent it through my embossing machine. Easy peasy!
My second card is also very simple, but by adding some texture in combination with some color, it stepped it up a bit. I wanted a “grunge board” look that is super trendy right now, so I first inked up my embossing folder by tapping the ink pad over it randomly.
I then sandwiched a panel of white cardstock in the folder and sent it through my embossing machine. Tip: If you want a nice and even saturation of color, glossy white cardstock works best! However, I wanted mine to look “grungy” and uneven so I used plain white cardstock.
This is a fun technique to try with endless possibilities!
Check out my second card:
A big thanks to Stampin’ Up! who has provided a chevron embossing folder to TWO lucky readers! Be sure to stop by my blog and leave a comment for a chance to win one!
Supplies used:Whisper white, gumball green, and sahara sand cardstock, chevron embossing folder, Word Play and Everything Eleanor stamp sets, midnight muse ink pad, soft suede and gumball green markers, linen thread and dimensional foam squares from Stampin’ Up!
Oh, Hello!
Supplies used: Whisper white, basic gray, strawberry slush, and pumpkin pie cardstock, pool party Core’dinations cardstock, Oh, Hello stamp set, basic gray, strawberry slush, and summer starfruit ink pads, chevron embossing folder, Window Frames Framelits dies, 1 1/4-inch-wide basic gray/basic black two-tone ribbon, silver designer button and white baker’s twine from Stampin’ Up!; 15m Permanent Strips E-Z Runner and 2X12mm DodzTM from Scrapbook Adhesive by 3L™.
For every issue of CardMaker, we hold two editorial reviews. The first review is where Tanya and I choose which designs we will be accepting working from printouts that we have received from designers. Once we have received all of the projects into our office, we then hold a second review to see if we still need to fill in categories and to select cover options.
For this second review, we set up all of the projects in the issue separated by feature category. Shown above is a little sneak peek of our Winter issue which we reviewed earlier this week. Can you believe we’re already thinking of Christmas and New Year’s?! There are so many fun projects to look forward to in this issue!
I think that if I liked sewing better I’d probably be a quilter. It’s such a beautiful art. The way you can combine fabric, pattern and layout bears a lot of similarities to what we paper crafters do when we work on a card. One thing I really love about quilting is the actual quilting itself, that detailed hand stitching or machine stitching that finishes the design so beautifully.
Since these two crafts have some transferable elements, I thought I’d try to recreate a honeycomb quilting design onto a card.
Begin by gathering some scraps of paper you like in coordinating patterns. I like to vary the scale and pattern as I’m picking and also coordinate but vary the colors. For this design, I used a small hexagon die template, my die-cutting machine and an embossing folder that has a design that would look like quilted stitching. I die-cut three to four small hexagons of each pattern and set them aside.
Then I placed my hexagons onto my cardstock in a honeycomb pattern, leaving some spaces not covered by patterned paper. Once I’ve played with the placement and have the patterns and colors where I like them I take a picture so I’ll remember where each part goes. That way if a piece gets moved I have something to refer back to.
Then, one by one I used Scor-Tape (because of it’s exceptional sticky-ness) and adhered each piece to the cardstock leaving a slight border between each hexagon. Trim off any patterned paper edges. I then placed my cardstock into an embossing folder so that the raised part of the embossing was on the top of my card (embossed rather than debossed).
Here you can see how great the embossing or “quilted stitching” looks.
And here’s the finished card with a wonderful vintage phone image that is being released by Flourishes this week!
We are excited to have former Blog Team member Glenda J. Wyatt guest-posting today! She’s sharing a video showing how easy the new Envelope Punch Board from We R Memory Keepers is to use. It will be your new must-have tool!
