I wasn’t feeling great yesterday, so I parked myself in my recliner and worked on designing greetings for my cards. When launching my first cards I deliberately kept the designs very simple. Now I’m feeling a bit more confident in my ability to put together Etsy listings, take product photos and all the other things that go into selling greeting cards. So it’s time to kick things up a notch.

I used Silhouette Studio to design these greetings. It’s free and makes it very easy to adjust individual letter shapes and move them independently of each other. Here’s an example in a font called Celtic MD.

As you can see, it looks a bit awkward when you simply type the letters. This is a pretty old font and at some point I’ll spend an afternoon to find a newer, better version. But even with a newer font, you’d want to tighten up the spacing between the letters, so they form a cohesive whole for a greeting. One day, when I’m happy with everything about the greetings, I’ll order a stamp of the designs. That way I can stamp with the same inks I use for the rest of the card so I get a perfect match. I’ll also be able to heat emboss it. More on that in a later post.

After adjustments it looks more like a greeting. “Happy birthday” is such an expected greeting, that you can take a lot of liberties with it and people will still read it correctly. In fact these days some designers shorten it to just “HBD.”

When I’m done, I print the result on white sticker paper. I apply the printed sticker paper to heavy white cardstock and die cut it. There are lots of die sets for cutting out sentiments. Here are a few that I like

• Tim Holtz Ticket Booth (Coordinating stamp set)

• Tim Holtz Labels

• Spellbinders A2 matting basics A and matting basics B (There’s a newer version of these but it’s not as versatile)

To use dies like these, you need a die cutting machine. I use Spellbinders’ Platinum 6. It’s the most popular die cutting machine on the market, and for good reason. The cutting mechanism runs much smoother than the nearest competitors from Sizzix.