I love getting American Crafts boxed cards during a sale – at about S$20 for a set of 40 cards, it amounts to only 50 cents per card & envelope, providing a really good base for quick card making, or even to use directly if necessary. But it is difficult to find a set where I like all the 10 designs provided; often the sentiments do not say what I want, or the prints for some of the cards make difficult backgrounds to work with.
However, inspiration hit when I saw the Maggie Holmes Marigold boxed cards on sale last month, and although I don’t like the sentiments on these 3 cards, the focal designs are beautiful and I bought the set without further hesitation.
My idea is to make use of the central focal pictures in window cards and remove/hide the unwanted sentiments. The black & white “Just for You” card is perfect for this – all I have to is to carefully tear away the sentiment in the centre for a hole that’s large enough for the swan/squirrel to peek through. This has to be done slowly in small steps though, as I did not want the words below the animal images to show through.
The back of the swan and squirrel cards have different patterned designs from the front, and so made beautiful contrasting secondary windows. I raised these 2nd tier windows on used packaging foam for a tad of dimension. Some adhesive pearly hearts complete the design.
I had trimmed the swan and squirrel papers to fit the position of the sentiment window. As a result, the inside of these cards are uneven. Initially I did not know what to do, but after completing the next set of cards, I had leftover black & white patterned paper. These are just right for covering up the mess and showing off a pretty patterned internal card base!
The next 2 cards are created using the squirrel card base – I selected 2 other black & white patterned card bases from the set and trimmed off 1/2″ from the length & breath of the rectangle. I made sure the windows are big enough to show the squirrel but small enough not to reveal the sentiment below it. The resulting window panels are again raised on used packaging foam for more dimension.
As the squirrel card base is white, there wasn’t much contrast between the 2 layers. So I used the Willow Lane washi tape set in my stash to line the white borders.
The washi tapes are also used to decorate the envelopes simply.
I had considered adding ribbon bows or paper flowers to the bottom of the windows as I felt there was too much plain empty space, but in the end decided to just let it be.
Next I did similarly with the swan card bases, this time selecting 2 other pinkish patterned card bases as the raised window panels. The resulting cards are a tad too pink for my taste – I must try to avoid this combination in future!
When I bought this boxed cards set, I had given myself a little challenge: to use up all the 40 cards – and 40 envelopes – in the set!! I wanted to use the cards as crafting materials, such as for fussy cutting. So far, this set of 6 window cards use up only 12 card bases and 6 envelopes. I have plans to use the remaining cards in the set for accordian albums and coptic bound booklets. Hopefully I can persevere and not let this become another unfinished Work-In-Progress!
Trying to Craft 