Tag: cardmaking

  • Happy Lunar New Year

    Happy Lunar New Year

    Here in Silicon Valley the Chinese New Year is celebrated almost as much as Valentine’s Day.

  • Using up leftover foil

    Using up leftover foil

    The critters’ gaze directs the viewers’ gaze, so use it to your advantage.

  • B♥️ Mine License Plate

    B♥️ Mine License Plate

    I have so many ideas for how to use these! How about a 🍕PIZZA, 🎂 HBD, 🐻 BEAR, 🦌 DEER or 🐋 WHALE license plate?

  • Orchid Postage Collage

    Orchid Postage Collage

    This card was inspired by the Waffle Flower December Sneak Peak Club that included the Mini Slimline Postage Collage dies and stencil.

  • Mistletoe card tutorial

    Mistletoe card tutorial

    That’s all for this card – now you can sit back and admire the sparkle! ✨

  • Happy Holiday Bears

    Happy Holiday Bears

    This is a relatively simple holiday card that would be easy to mass produce in a couple of evenings.

  • Monochrome Holiday Stocking

    Monochrome Holiday Stocking

    This die set is great to use with scraps, because there are lots of small dies that combine to create characters and greenery.

  • Lovely Layers Deer

    Lovely Layers Deer

    The main feature of these cards is the Lovely Layers Deer Die Set by Honey Bee Stamps.

  • Trinity Stamps Birthday Witch

    Trinity Stamps Birthday Witch

    With the lunar eclipse happening on October 28, I thought a witch flying in front of an eclipsed moon was a fitting motif.

  • Lovely Layers Quail

    This is also the very first video on my brand new YouTube channel, @ValleyOakPaper. I’d love it if you watched and subscribed. To begin with I’ll be releasing weekly cardmaking videos there.

  • Halloween Gift Card Mugs

    Halloween Gift Card Mugs

    This is a quick and easy way to dress up gift cards for Halloween. The paper I used is scrapbook paper pad from Michael’s. I paired it with glitter paper in matching colors, also from Michaels.

  • Pumpkin & Plaid

    Pumpkin & Plaid

    The theme was supposed to be making your own plaid, but as you’ll see I cheated.

  • Bring on the Heat Embossing

    Bring on the Heat Embossing

    I knew I wanted hot colors for the landscape itself, but I die cut the landscape from white. Then I used Distress Oxide Inks to color them.

  • Whale Thank-You Cards

    Whale Thank-You Cards

    I cut out the parts of the whale from inexpensive watercolor paper and colored them with Distress Watercolor pencils following photos of humpback whales. The upper part and tail are colored with Black Soot. For the shadows under the whale I used Hickory Smoke.

  • Whale in a Bottle

    Whale in a Bottle

    The bottle die is 5.5” tall. That means that you can use it to create a shaped A2 card. Unfortunately that also means that it’s a little too big to fit comfortably on an A2 card. So that’s why I chose to make this a 5 by 7 card instead.

  • Merry Everything

    Merry Everything

    Ink smooshing is a very popular technique that creates backgrounds with random blotches of ink. A couple of tips: You can smoosh your ink pads onto your craft mat. That’s where the name of the technique comes from.

  • Vintage Typewriter Father’s Day Card

    Vintage Typewriter Father’s Day Card

    This is a relatively simple card, but it gets the message across and who doesn’t love a vintage typewriter? I got the idea for this card when I was looking at the die set on the Spellbinders web site.

  • Vellum Cards with Envelopes

    Vellum Cards with Envelopes

    Vellum is tricky, because glue will show through it. There are a couple of different strategies for getting around this.

  • Emboss Resist

    Emboss Resist

    To watercolor with the spray stains, I made sure I shook the bottles until there was no mica sludge left at the bottom. Then I unscrewed the spray mechanism and touched the stem where I wanted the color. I used brushes to push the paint where I wanted it. The first layer was very blotchy,…

  • Mini Slimline Cards

    Mini Slimline Cards

    If you’re not sure how to place flowers, there are two principles that can guide you. The first one is to place flowers around the focal point of the card. The second one is to place decorations in a diagonal. If you combine the two principles, you cluster decorations around the sentiment and let them…

  • Pop-Up Tree

    Pop-Up Tree

    The theme for the Instagram hop this Sunday was Butterfly or Bee and Symmetry. I took the chance to use the recent Flowering tree pop-up die set from Spellbinders. It creates a fantastic four-tiered card that folds flat into a regular A2 format. It’s a real stunner and not too hard to pull off.

  • Pink Mother’s Day Card

    Pink Mother’s Day Card

    This is where things went wrong. Out of sheer habit, I doubled up the die cuts. That meant that I couldn’t create an eclipse card. 🤦🏼‍♀️ Find out how I recovered from my mistake.

  • Duckling Cards

    Duckling Cards

    I started by laying out the dies on inexpensive watercolor paper and marking out how much space each of them would need. Then I colored the marked areas with Distress Crayons.

  • Single-Layer Spring Card

    Single-Layer Spring Card

    At this point I really wanted to add dimension to the card. But it was supposed to be a single layer card. So instead of adding dimension, I added texture.