This is the design of one the Thank You Notes that I’m sending to my customers who purchased either Stampin’ Up! products or my own personal tutorials in March. I am so grateful for everyone who helps me to be successful at what I do, but especially my Stampin’ Up! customers. Today I have some tips for designing and making multiples of a fun card.
Aloha, all!
There was a time when I considered myself fortunate to need one or two Thank You Cards. Then I saw how many I needed to make for last month. I thought that I was going to have to scale back to simpler cards. But what fun is that, especially when I’m so appreciative? I had to do something more than a basic single layer, stamped card.
Start With Some Patterned Paper
One thing that does not come naturally to me is choosing colors for a project. So one of the keys to choosing colors is to choose some patterned paper – and of course, I use Stampin’ Up!’s Designer Series Papers – and then go with combinations of some of the colors. For today’s project I chose some paper that’s going to be retiring, Ornate Garden Specialty Designer Series Paper.
Once I saw the colors in that paper, there was another retiring product in one of the colors that it featured. I’ve loved the Terracotta Tile color since Stampin’ Up! first introduced it two year ago. But, for the most part, those In Colors only stay in the catalog for two years. So Terracotta Tile became one of the colors I was going to use. Going through the other colors gave me the idea to do something with flowers for the card and make the leaves Old Olive.
Now that I had my colors, I went back to the Ornate Garden Papers and chose the Terracotta Tile Monochrome Print from the paper set. As I knew that the other color was going to be Old Olive, I chose that for the cardstock that would serve as a mat for the patterned paper.
Then I cut some simple layers of Basic White Thick Cardstock, Old Olive Cardstock, and the Ornate Garden print. Without gluing them together, I just studied the layout for a bit. That’s when I remembered that I’d just bought the Pierced Blooms Dies. I could use even more of the Terracotta Tile and not have to worry about stamping and cutting a lot of flowers. All I needed to do what to add another color. It wasn’t too long before I found Night of Navy Cardstock and my color palette was complete.
How I Made It Quickly – the Die Cutting
If you use the Stampin’ Cut & Emboss machine, you know how long it takes to run just one set of plates through the machine. Even though the result is worth the time and effort, I try not to have to make too many runs. But I wanted lots of flowers and I was going to be using three colors of cardstock. It didn’t take me long to realize that having the exact floral layout on each of the many cards that I as making would take a lot of time. But anyone who receives one of these cards is only going to see the one card I sent. How are they going to know what the other cards look like? (OK, they can read my blog post. But still.)
So I took every flowers in the die set and ran it through the machine four times. There! Lots of flowers both large and small. Same thing with the leaves, though I only needed the one color (Old Olive). This was really going to be quick!
Unfortunately, I couldn’t die-cut that rectangle from the Stitched So Sweetly Dies more than one at a time because I have only one die. The good news was that I only needed one per card.
How I made It Quickly – the Assembly Line
I think that a key to getting stuff done quickly is to do it as an assembly line, even though I’m the only assembler. First I die-cut the rectangles. Second, I mounted the “Thank You” stamp from the Free as a Bird Stamp Set onto a Stamparatus plate and whipped out the stamping in all the cards in short order. Then I glued together the two main layers and stamped rectangle, again for all of the cards. Then I cut and tied the bow, made of retiring Terracotta Tile Ribbon from the Ornate Garden Ribbon Combo. I glued the ribbon-tied layers to the card base and started in on the flowers. Oh, and by the way. That beautiful ribbon is going to be retiring, too.
Here’s another tip. Lay the flowers out just like you want them to look on the final card. Then take a quick cell-phone photo before you take them all off and start gluing. With this many elements, that picture really helps. After you get the first card done, you can delete the picture and just make the rest of the cards using the first one as an example.
The Bottom Line
First of all – wouldn’t you like to have one of my Thank You Cards? There are two ways to get one. One is to buy some Stampin’ Up! products from my very own Stampin’ Up! Store. Click here or on any of the icons in the slide show below. Another is to order one or more of my tutorials in my Tutorial Shop right here on my website. The extra benefit is that you’ll have new things to play with in your own studio!
Then there are all those retiring Stampin’ Up! products. Again, you can find all of them in my Stampin’ Up! store. There’s also a list of what’s retiring on May 3, 2021, right here.
Have a great time crafting this week!
