If you don’t want to read the nuances about the cards I created in 2022, this is where you can see them all by month of creation. Regardless of life circumstances I was determined to get some cards made.
Hope this provides some inspiration for your own cards!
Also on Instagram @craftyk.3
My brother turned 50 this month and is a lifelong Star Wars fan. Since this is a milestone birthday I decided to make a custom Yoda themed Star Wars card.
I sketched out a few ideas for this one. The wording was the hard part. Thankfully lots of people are Star Wars fans and I knew one of them had to have a “Yoda translator” and I was right. To get the translator to work, you need a decent number of words. After a few attempts I came up with something that I liked.
For the fonts, I have a couple of Star Wars options that I downloaded from dafont years ago. One has mostly letters and the other character and ship outlines. I found Yoda and got to work.
After laying it out I decided to fill the white space between the text with the rebel symbol. Behind that and Yoda I put in a couple of pages from my old daily calendar. Yoda is mounted with some mounting tape to give dimension.
Assembly on this one was challenging! I have not mastered transfer tape. In my case press n seal, so maybe it’s not as stable to work with. I ended up laying out all the letters by hand. Once I reached happy birthday I was determined to use the press n seal. It wasn’t perfect, but it is straighter than what I was able to do free hand.
Also now on Instagram @craftyk.3
I made this kit in 2021 and ended up getting another one. It’s a kit from 1988. Everything comes ready to make the card, including the envelope.
The last version of this card ended up going to my uncle for Christmas. This one will be going with all my cards to a friend’s craft fair booth.
It’s a straight forward pattern, only a few quarter stitches sprinkled in. French knots in metallic thread is the challenge with this pattern. Looks awesome when done, but not easy getting there. Metallic thread makes me nervous I guess. I can have very dry hands and pick that stuff up and I’m sweating like crazy and the thread just frays. I ran it through thread magic several times which kept it together a little longer this time.
I do struggle with picking which color to work on each time I finish a general area. There is a fair amount of “confetti” in this one. To keep stitches consistent a little planning is needed.
Started: September 16th
Finished: October 8th
Stitching time: 7.75 hours
Also now on Instagram @craftyk.3
This pattern is from a 1988 card kit. The pattern is hand drawn! I can’t imaging having to draw out patterns by hand. Sometimes advancements in technology are great.
Compared to the last several projects this one was easy. Mostly because the pattern was bigger than the actual design.
Well I thought it was easy until I started stitching. Then it took longer than expected to complete. There are several color changes and backstitching tends to take longer I think.
I have no idea what my deal is with metallic thread. I get all sweaty when it’s time to use it and that’s the worst time to have sweaty hands. By the second strand I was running it through Thread Magic at least 3 times to try and keep it together (usually it frays really bad). The extra coatings did help.
Since this is part of a kit, assembly went smoothly. Double sided tape to hold the aperture card together.
Started: August 7th
Finished: September 4th
Stitching time: 7 hours
Also now on Instagram @craftyk.3
This card is involves a few of firsts for me. A sort of first to start things off, I thought I was going to make 2 of these. Instead of my usual one-of-a-kind. I had a piece of paper to stamp on big enough to stamp twice. I tried, but I underestimated how much ink was left and had a really faded version 2.
It all turned out ok, I used that second try to test out colors.
I learned that maybe spending a bunch of money on markers that have an extra fine tip might be worth it in the future. Most of the areas are so tiny I couldn’t color in the lines very well. I bought a fairly cheap set on Amazon. The review compared them to the name brand kind that have tri-tips, these only have chisel and brush.
Here’s the inside. It came in the box with the stamp on the front. Based on the packaging I’m pretty sure they are Stampin’ Up. I’m sure others have used this set and made much fancier cards.
I also took a photo from the bottom to show the depth with the foam tape. The wallpaper and cardstock paper are taped down and the cardstock with the stamping and coloring is mounted with foam tape.
I think this card looks awesome and it’s part of my personal collection. Someday the right person will come along that I just have to send it to them.
This card took a very long time in the making. I decided to stop assembling cards as I got things stitched. Little did I know this would take until the end of February to assemble and beginning of May to photograph for this blog!
In that time I did sign up on Instagram to show off cards this year. As I found a few people to follow I saw this cool thing of taking a baby food jar and storing thread scraps in it. I believe that person is keeping them all to put on display. For me it’s become the perfect portable trash can.
To finish this card I used a page from one of those small books of scrapbook paper. I bought 2 Christmas themed ones and thought this page was a good fit. Since the mouse has a little Santa hat I thought the “HO HO HO” was good. I would have preferred it to be on the right, but this is how the paper comes. The words were in the far bottom left of the sheet. The mistletoe having the green to tie the two together in a second way.
The base of the card is white cardstock with the front being taped on with double sided tape. The cross stitch is adhered with a piece of foam tape. I didn’t get it cut out the greatest, but it works and looks ok.
Started: October 31
Finished: November 6
Stitching time: 2 hours
If you don’t want to read the nuances about the cards I created in 2021, this is where you can see them all by month of creation. Due to continued life circumstances there are very few cards created. You can also use this to get some inspiration for your own cards!
If you don’t want to read the nuances about the cards I created in 2020, this is where you can see them all by month of creation. Due to life circumstances there are very few cards created. You can also use this to get some inspiration for your own cards!
It’s not everyday you know someone who has been around for nine decades. My husband’s grandma now has. We’re having lunch with her to celebrate along with other members of the small family.
Her husband also reached 90, however he didn’t live much longer after that. We didn’t know his birthday would be the last we saw him well. Such is life, some people get more of it than others.
The card I had made for my husband’s grandpa can be found here. I came up with the idea easily since he was a former farmer and was always asking about how the farming community has been doing in Iowa and Nebraska. The card was a hit, so I had some pressure with getting this second card right.
I went through a few different ideas. If you want to see some of the inspiration cards I found on Pinterest you can see my Birthday Card board here. The first idea I had involved wallpaper. The second idea had me trying to print a border from a design pattern pack I downloaded recently. This was my third attempt.
I found cardstock that had flower like the printed pattern I wanted to use. (That did not go well at all!) I knew I wanted to use my scripty stamps for happy and birthday, which left the 90th. I wanted a big bold font and found that Impact does the job nicely. I used gold adhesive foil for the letters.
To make sure I spaced out my glitter glue dots evenly I created a dotted line box in Illustrator. In a way I designed the elements in there, then used some of it in the Cricut Design space for the cutting. Like the cutout behind the 90 I drew around the 90th typed in AI. I made the layers different colors so it would pull 2 mats for the Cricut to cut on (the paper and foil). I printed just the dotted line box and made sure it fit inside of the frame, since I wanted the dots inside.
Double sided tape and foam tape were used to put it all together. The stamping is directly on the cardstock base. The foil has weird patterning on it from the press n’ seal I used, it wasn’t holding and the sticky stuff really sticks when you push it on too hard. Does give it an interesting texture though.
What do you get when you cross a welder and a wood crafter? This card! Also you get the final card of the #cardproject2019. This has been an intense year of cross stitching for sure, but now it has come to a close. The final birthday today, December 31st.
I pulled a few tools out of a larger pattern called Grandpa’s Workshop from the May/June 1993 Cross Stitch & Country Crafts magazine. This way they would fit on a card and be relevant to his interest of wood crafting.
The saw blades were the hardest to stitch and outline. A bunch of quarter stitches all in a row is hard to do and keep consistent. I seem to have a hard time parting the fabric right in the middle to get a nice clean look. This might be something that is only noticeable to other stitchers too.
In my paper I didn’t find anything I liked much so went for my wallpaper stash. I found the paper I used first, then saw a foam wood paper that I considered for the frame. While wood seems to make more sense the tools seemed to get lost more with it, so I went with my initial thought of the silver.
Then it was deciding if I wanted to put the dark area in the middle or just the bottom. Putting it at the bottom won since it’s hard for me to line up the Cricut to cut exactly where I wanted. Getting a dark stripe right in the center would be too hard so I went with below and I think it works well.
The paper sample was smaller than most to begin with and my first try I didn’t measure the hole correctly. Luckily the pattern is banded so I flipped it around and tried again with more breathing room around the cross stitch. I used double sided tape to hold everything together.
Started: November 16th
Finished: November 27th
