World Card Making Day

You can never have too many birthday cards on hand; so whenever I feel like crafting but don't have a specific project in mind - I make a birthday card. (Anyone need some extras... cuz I often feel like crafting without a specific project in mind.)



This card is deceptively simple. A decorative border along one side, a lightly patterned paper, one birthday cake stamp, and a sentiment. The stamps are from Stampin' Up, as is the patterned paper.

My tip for the day revolves around the sentiment. One of the most frustrating crafting mistakes is when you create a whole card, spend tons of time arranging layers of paper, making embellishments, and then you go to stamp the sentiment on the card somewhere, and you goof it up. It's crooked. Or the ink isn't uniform. So irritating!

The card pictured above is a sneaky solution to prevent those problems. Instead of stamping directly on the card surface, stamp the sentiment on coordinating scrap paper (in this case, the same paper as the card base), and then cut it into pieces that can be attached to the card anywhere that suits your design. You can even add dimensional adhesive behind the scraps to make the sentiment "pop" off the card. For the card above, the sentiment cut into two pieces fills the empty space above the cake stamp and balances the card. Plus, I could easily keep re-stamping the sentiment on scrap paper until I got a version that I was happy with! :)

Here's other tips for getting great stamped images:

~ When you're inking your stamp, follow the "twist, twist, tap, tap" method. Gently twisting the stamps on your ink pad will help coat the stamp evenly.

~ Before you stamp the image on the paper, turn the stamp over and look to see if the ink is fully covering the stamp - these seems like, duh, but you'd be surprised how many goofs you can avoid just by giving the stamp a once over before actually stamping!

~ Acrylic stamps (the ones that are clear/see through and cling to a stamping block) can sometimes take a little "breaking in." Stamping the image on scratch paper several times before using it on a card, (re-inking each time in between) can help improve the image quality that you'll get. I don't know why this seems to work (and some of you may disagree), but I've discovered this after being disappointed in how stamp images have turned out in the past.

~ Don't give up if you make a stamping mistake! Why do you think we crafters buy so much paper? We need to have lots of extra supplies on hand so we can keep going when there's an oops!