card making, how to, papercrafts, trimcraft, tutorial

Banner Cards with First Edition Let’s Celebrate: How To

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In this post I’m going to be showing you how to make this fun, but incredibly simple banner cut out card. I’m not good with fancy-fold cards (my brain isn’t mathematical enough!), but I do occasionally like to make cards that are just a *little bit* different.

To make this you will need:

  • an 8×8″ paper pad (or larger). I used First Edition’s new release, ‘Let’s Celebrate’ for mine
  • A sentiment stamp, and decorative stamps if desired too
  • Heat Embossing Equipment (ink, powder, heat tool)
  • Ink Pad
  • 5×7″ white card blank (or white cardstock large enough to make your own)
  • Banner Die 3 x 4.5″ (7.5 x 11.5cm) – if you don’t have this then don’t worry too much!

To Start:

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Die cut two banner shapes. If you don’t have the die (my set was from The Works  but they don’t seem to have them available online right now), then not to worry! It’s a very easy shape to cut yourself, just use the measurements listed above.

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Back each of your banners on a contrasting paper and cut around leaving a border of a few mm. If you have the appropriate sized die you can just cut that and use it to back the original shape, but I find it easier to do it this way!

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Attach the banners to your 5×7″ card blank (I go for double sided tape as my adhesive, but use whatever your preference is). Make sure each banner is at the very edge of the card at the left edge and then on the top and bottom edges.

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Cut around the banner shapes using scissors or a craft knife, again, whichever your preference. Be careful to only cut through one layer of card and not the back too!

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Cut another contrasting paper to just under 5 x 7″ and attach to the inside of the card.

And that’s it for the card shape! You can now decorate however you wish, but I’ll show you how I did mine to give you an idea.

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Stamp and emboss a sentiment on a paper scrap, about 2-2.5″ wide (about 5cm).

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Cut the paper you’ve stamped into a smaller square or rectangle, back with a contrasting paper leaving a 2mm-ish border, then attach to a longer, but slightly narrower strip of paper.

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Attach to card and finish with some stamping!

It is up to you whether to attach your decorative piece to just one or to both banners, if you attach it to just one then the banners can ‘open’ separately, however…

When you make a vertical card – only attach the sentiment/sentiment cluster to the bottom banner. If you attach it to the top banner then gravity will work against you and it will droop!

This card shape also works great horizontally:

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How super easy is that?! You can then write your message on the inside of the banners or on the back of the card.

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If you’d like to see some more projects with Let’s Celebrate, then check out the Inspiration Area of Trimcraft’s The Craft Blog.

Grace ❤

 

card making, Christmas, how to, papercrafts, tutorial

Super Simple Christmas Crafts 2: Wreath Card (Templates)

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Woop! Another installment of my Super Simple Christmas Crafts! This time making this attractive circle wreath card. You can watch the video tutorial for instructions here;

And here are the templates:

PDFs (for fussy cutting)

CIRCLE CARD BLANK PDF

HOLLY AND IVY LEAVES 1 PDF

HOLLY AND IVY LEAVES 2 PDF

Cut Files (for Silhouette Users):

Circle Card Blank

Holly and Ivy Leaves 1

Holly and Ivy Leaves 2

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Happy Crafting!

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Grace ❤ @ms.paperlover

Brimbles, brimbles sticker club, planners, sticker kit

Brimbles Sticker Club Projects – September

It’s September! Yaaaaaaaaaaaaay!

I love autumn so so much. And the colours and florals of this month’s sticker club are the perfect transition from summer to autumn. Like last month, I decided to do a variety of projects with my stickers, instead of one ‘big’ one.

 

First was a planner spread. So far I’ve used my sticker club stickers to decorate my personal size, but I decided it was time to change things up a bit and so decorated my A5. I don’t use any particular inserts in my A5 – just dot grid paper, meaning I can change the layout every single week – and this is how it looked with the September Garden stickers:

 

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Now usually I would show you how it looked at the end of the week too – but due to the timing of this post it’s not all filled in yet! But if you’re interested there’ll be pictures of my spread on my instagram (which is linked at the top of this page under my logo). There is also a Plan With me video which you can watch here if you’d like.

 

My next project is also planner related. I used another of my dot grid pages to create a bullet journal-esque month at a glance.

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My favourite part of this page is the page flags in the top right corner which I doodled on to make them into a banner.

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It’s such a simple but effective little technique (for which I can claim no originality whatsoever, I’ve seen it many times on instagram!).

 

My last project was this bookmark:

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It was really simple to make, I just took some white card and cut it to size. I found a quote about reading online and wrote it on the card in pencil. Then I put the stickers down, and then went over the pencil with a .38 black gel pen. For the top I simply used a hole punch for the hole and threaded some ribbon through it. I actually wanted to use black ribbon but turns out that I don’t have any! So I went with pink organza instead.

And yeah, ok, I admit it, I am not currently reading Jane Austen’s Emma (although I have many times!). But my current book is too big and boofy and wouldn’t lay flat for a picture! (Just in case you were wondering, it’s CS Lewis’ Cosmic Trilogy in one volume that wouldn’t behave for a photo).

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Bookmark update: do not leave where your cat (or other curious creature) can find it, for the cat will find the ribbon tassel irresistible to chew on, pulling the bookmark out of your book and you will lose your place!

And there we go! I still have a few stickers left, some may end up on my planner pages towards the end of the week to fill in any gaps, and the rest will probably end up in my journal for light decoration. Thanks so much for reading and I hope you have a great September!

Grace ❤

@ms.paperlover

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card making, follow friday, papercrafts, trimcraft

Follow Friday – Trimcraft / The Craft Blog

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Just a short post today to share with you guys the wonderful company that is Trimcraft for #followfriday

Of course, everyone reading this probably already knows who and what Trimcraft are, as they’re responsible for well known brands such as First Edition, Dovecraft, and Simply Creative.

But as well as that The Craft Blog is an incredible source for any crafter – they have tips, tricks, processes, freebies, and giveaways. As well as the ‘inspiration‘ section where their design team, as well as anyone else registered on the site, can post pictures of their creations to share.

They also have a YouTube channel which has both great tutorials and fun videos showcasing the products.

Plus of course their instagram (make sure to watch their instagram stories!), Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

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Besides their amazing products, what I love about this company is how they really care about being creative and communicating and networking with fellow crafters. Not many other companies provide so many freebies, tutorials, or host so many competitions and giveaways (which yours truly has even won one of!), or make such efforts to stay in touch with their followers.

You may already follow them on instagram, or facebook; but make sure to check out the blog and the website if you don’t already, it really has so many amazing crafty resources.

oh, and P.S. – no I was not paid in paper pads or washi to create this post, I just genuinely love this company 😛

P.P.S – if you have a blog and/or YouTube channel and would like to be featured on a Follow Friday (you can be a regular person, you don’t have to be a craft company!) please contact me using the form on the menu above, or email mspaperlover@outlookcom

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Grace ❤ @ms.paperlover

 

 

 

 

card making, Christmas, papercrafts, trimcraft

Trimcraft Bloggers Event – Christmas in August!

With a good 40% of the items in my craftroom being Trimcraft, when I got an email from them inviting me to their bloggers event, I squealed. I definitely squealed, loudly.

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So on Saturday 5th August a small hoard of bloggers and vloggers descended into the Trimcraft HQ in Nottingham (fun fact, between 2012-2016 I lived ten minutes away from their HQ and never knew!). We were greeted with… Christmas. Just, the most Christmassy Christmas of the Christmasses! They must have worked so hard to do all that, so massive kudos to the Trimcraft staff for their decorating skills!

They treated us to food, drink, and goodies galore! Even kicking things off with a Christmas present for us all…

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We were then introduced to all the gorgeous Christmas ranges and collections for this year:

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Items from the collections were spread all over the tables, and we got our craft on. We got our craft on hard. There were four craft activities during the day, two of which were things I had never ever done before. We made Christmas wreaths with decoupage (patch? maché? I still don’t know which is which)

Next was a quick session of Christmas card making, something I am certainly familiar with!

Those are mine on the left and then a snap of the pile of cards made by everyone. The cards are being donated to a local charity 🙂

The last two were a Christmas cracker:

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And then we made felt tree decorations which I was just… shockingly awful at. Really, truly, hilariously, awful. So much so I don’t have a picture of it (but it is featured in all its grotesque glory in my video of the event, which I’ll have a link for lower down this post). But I had fun making it! And that’s what is important… right? (seriously it’s so bad it’s almost good!)

However, if you were interested in making your own, you can find free templates on Trimcraft’s blog, The Craft Blog.

Penguin

Cracker

Other Christmas Freebies

We also got to have a little nosy around their show room (called ‘Snow Room’ for the day, lolz). I nearly wept when I saw the display of First Edition Paper Pads:

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Unfortunately all good things must come to an end and so came home time. Though we did not go away empty handed, oh no no no. On our way out we were each presented with the most incredible goody bag featuring SO VERY MANY items from all the Christmas ranges this year. To see what is in the goody bag in detail you’ll have to watch my video, but here’s a photo of everything laid out:

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So a huge thank you to the Trimcraft staff for being the friendliest and most welcoming bunch of lovely people, and for all the hard work they put into the day. It was so much fun to meet new people and to craft away to your heart’s content using gorgeous new products and… not having to worry about cleaning up the mess afterwards!

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A “Craftermath”

I’ll have some Christmas crafts up here on the blog in the coming months, so keep an eye out for those.

And lastly, here’s the video I mentioned earlier, which includes a small amount of vlog footage from the day as well as a run through of all the items from the goody bag

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Grace ❤ @ms.paperlover

card making, how to, papercrafts, tutorial

Creative Process – A Teenager’s Birthday Card

When I make birthday (or anniversary or get well soon or whatever) cards, I don’t just make a load of generic cards and choose one for the recipient (though maybe I should, it would be far less time consuming), I really make them for that person; with them in mind. Their tastes, their aesthetic. And so on.

This card was for my eldest niece, for her fourteenth birthday. Being fourteen she needed something grown up enough, but also not too grown up (did that make sense? Probably not!). I chose the First Edition ‘Sweet Nothings’ paper pad by Trimcraft to make this card, as it has some seriously pretty papers in it.

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And the paper I chose for the base of my card is one of the textured papers with this beautiful wood and floral pattern on. I made the card 6×7″ (it needed to be slightly taller than 6″, you’re about to see why.

So I wanted to stitch my niece’s name onto the card. I printed off her name in one of my favourite fonts to stitch with (‘Beyond the Mountains’). This font does however often do this strange thing where it cuts off the bottom of some of the letters when you print so I filled in those bits with pencil.

I lined the template up to where I wanted it on my card and poked in the holes. If you’re new to paper stitching you can read my how-to on it here. Words are a little harder than shapes but it’s the same basic principle. Just make sure you have your printed template handy so you can use it for reference, sometimes all you can see is a load of holes and it’s hard to know what’s what.

I chose to stitch in white, as the cream thread I have is a bit of a yellow cream and so wouldn’t work with this card. But this turned out to be a bit of an error too as once the word was stitched it was quite hard to see. It shows up better on the picture above but in real life you had to squint to read it!

To solve this problem I decided to fill in the letters with some colour, using this ‘tea dye’ varnish, so that it would be a fairly subtle colour. As you may be able to see I did accidentally paint some of the thread, I don’t have a very steady hand, but it doesn’t matter too much!

Once that was all done and dry it was time to do the rest of the card. Whenever I’m doing a project like this I have a little root through my ephemera packs to see what I have to match, then throw it all into a little basket so it’s handy.

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Then, well, I stuck it on! I had a play around first, seeing what I wanted to put where, and I usually take a couple of photos on my phone to see what I like best. This is what I ended up with:

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It’s a mix of pieces from the cut-apart sheet from the Sweet Nothings paper pad, and some punch outs from it too. Then some random things I found in my ephemera root around!

The paper you can just see behind the card is what I used to line the inside. Because of the stitching on the front I had to cover up the mess of washi tape and knots that was behind it! IMG_3991

Being a teenager, my niece wanted money and make up for her birthday. I’d already wrapped the make up I’d bought her but I also made a little cash envelope using my WE R MEMORY KEEPERS 123 punch board. Which I stuck down with a velcro dot on the inside of the card so it would be easy for her to remove.

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I also wrote ‘for you’ on a black label with an embossing pen and embossed it with gold powder.

On every card I make I emboss this ‘handmade with love’ stamp too for something to put on the back of the card.

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The last thing to do was to make an envelope, again using my 123 punch board. I chose what I thought was a suitable paper from the First Edition pad…IMG_3999

…and once it was punched I also did some simple decoration on the front of the envelope, adding her name with alpha stickers. Which I forgot to take a picture of, woops!

So there it is, one of my homemade, personalised cards. Because of the stitching, which can take an absolute age, the whole thing probably took me about 90 minutes. But I love making my cards really special for my family and close friends.

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Oh I forgot, I added some flat back pearls too! That’s it… I think!

Thanks so much for reading, let me know if you’d like to see more card making posts 🙂

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Grace ❤ @ms.paperlover