Aloha, all!
For my Throwback Thursday blog posts, I’ll be going back to early blog posts to look for projects that I’d like to update using more modern techniques. For today, I found a card that I made to use for swaps at my very first Stampin’ Up! convention. When you’re making swaps, especially where you need a lot as at a stampers’ convention, you want something that’s quick and easy.
A Quick and Easy Card – That Doesn’t Look It!
Even as the experienced crafter that I am now, this is not a card that I would call either quick or easy.
The card base is Basic Black Cardstock, and the sentiment (from a retired stamp set) is heat embossed. Back at the time I made this, Stampin’ Up! had several sizes of square punches in their catalog. The squares in this card are 1-1/8″.
So what’s the process? Lay the card on a grid sheet and use a ruler to get those squares all lined up? That along with the heat embossing (a 3-step process at best, not counting cleaning up all the embossing powder) makes this not a quick card.
But it is if you have a Window Template. Cut a square on the diagonal in the middle of a piece of cardstock that’s the same size as your card base, and, poof! You can take those little squares and just put them in the corners and glue them down.
Back in 2008, the way I did this was to measure where I wanted the big square, and then I used a craft knife to cut my square. That’s what made this card so easy to create multiples. I must also have had an assembly line process going for the heat embossing. But that’s another story.
Here’s What I Did for the Same Design Today
With no square punches at my disposal today, I simply cut 1″ strips of paper – in this case, Boho Indigo Designer Series Paper – and light cardstock (Very Vanilla Cardstock) Then I cut those strips again into 1″ squares. Pretty quick with the Stampin’ Up! Paper Trimmer.
And I still made a window so I could make these quickly. In fact, I did make a bunch of them for a card exchange group I’m in. But making my window this time was incredibly easy. The reason is that I have thin square dies and a die-cutting machine that spits these out pretty quickly!
The Template
Here is the template I used. The piece of plain cardstock is 4″ x 5-1/4″, which is the same size as the Night of Navy Cardstock that I used for the card front. I did lay the cardstock out on grid paper, and found the center point along the top. Then I laid the 2-1/8″ plain square from the Layering Squares Dies on that line, and made sure that the left and right points were on the same lines on the grid paper. I drew pencil lines and then ran the cardstock and the square die through my Cutting and Embossing Machine (available to customers next month).
To create each card, I first added some temporary glue to the template and laid it on the Night of Navy Cardstock. Then I added each of the four 1″ squares, adhering them with Multipurpose Liquid Glue so I could nudge them into place easily.
Finishing the Card
I have a project underway that involves showing how different products from the Boho Indigo Product Medley can be used in different ways. So I decided to add two other products from the medley to this project.
The little Navy Blue Flowers are the the Medley grouping, but they don’t come in Night of Navy. They are white fabric. But a Night of Navy Stampin’ Blends marker can turn white into Night of Navy pretty quickly! And that’s what I did.
The ribbon across the bottom is one of the two rolls of ribbon that come with the Medley. This one is Gold Ribbon with a bit of Very Vanilla color along the edges. Gold is an accent color throughout the Medley, and this is one of my favorites of those accents.
The sentiment is from a set you’ve seen me use a lot since the current Stampin’ Up! Annual Catalog was released – Lovely You. I stamped it using Night of Navy Classic Ink and then punched it using the Lovely Labels Pick a Punch. The stamp set and punch are part of a bundle, by the way. If you buy them together, you get a 10% discount! Just click on the icon for the bundle to see the price for the bundle.
I’ll be sharing some more posts about this Product Medley over the next couple of weeks. If you have any questions about it, please let me know. I love this so much that I’ve become quite the expert on it!
Happy Stamping!
