It Takes All Kinds

An idea for displaying your cards

It's getting to be that time of year when you will be getting piles and piles of Christmas cards in the mail. I thought I'd share a display that I made last year to hold my Christmas cards.

Instructions:

1. Find an open-back frame (with no glass). I bought mine on sale at Hobby Lobby, but you could also look at thrift shops. Mine is 18"x24" (the opening).

2. Measure the inside of your frame to decide how many wires you want going across & how far apart. I used 6 wires at 3" apart (except for the top & bottom one).

3. Mark on the back of the frame where you will want your wires on each side.

4. Using any sort of thin metal wire, cut a piece that will span the width of your frame, plus add a few inches at each end to attach.

5. Beginning at the top spot, attach a wire to one side using a staple gun. Be sure to leave a tail of about 3". Use a few staples to make the hold stronger.

6. Fold the excess wire over & staple again. This will help to make sure your wire won't come undone.

7. Repeat on the other side. You can make your wires as tight or as loose as you'd like. As you can see from the picture, I left mine just a teeny bit loose.

8. Repeat steps 4-7 for each row. You may want to cover the wires on the back of the frame with a strong tape so they don't scratch your walls.

9. Use clips to attach your cards/tags/decor. I used atc clips by 7 Gypsies, but you could also use binder clips, paper clips, clothespins, etc. Get creative!

 

Here is my frame filled with Christmas cards:

What unique ways do you display your Christmas cards?

Tutorial: Stacked Christmas Trees

I adapted this idea from one that I saw on The Small Object blog. Hers are made with fabric, but as soon as I saw them I wanted to try this with patterned paper.

You will need:

Assorted holiday patterned papers
Assorted ribbon, trim and embellishments
Adhesive
Sewing Machine (optional)

Instructions

Download the template, which can be found here, print and cut pieces out. Use template pieces to cut out four semi circles of patterned paper.

Either glue or stitch ribbon to the curved edge of semi-circles, leaving a bit of ribbon overhang

You can also use your sewing machine to stitch a zigzag stitch along the straight edge of the semi-circle

Now using adhesive, make the semi-circles into cones. To do this I ran a bit of glue along half of the straight edge, then bent the semi-circle so that the ends of the curves section
met and overlapped a bit. Cut off any excess ribbon.

Now stack cones to form tree, starting with largest.

Add a holiday or seasonal element to top of tree

Variations

Use glitter glue on edges instead of ribbon or trim (blue tree)
Add other embellishments e.g. buttons, to body of tree. (pink tree)
Use decorative scissors to cut edges of semi circles (pink tree)
Make bigger trees by cutting larger semi-circles

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial! You can make an entire forest of these trees with your paper scraps!

Holiday Crafting Extravaganza!

Hello everyone! With the holiday season fast approaching, here at ITAK we are going to dedicate the next six weeks to a Holiday Crafting Extravaganza. Check back often to see lots of holiday craft ideas from the team including tutorials for cards and holiday decor!

Are you ready to get crafting for the holidays?

Watered Silk

Ann Marie here!  I had hoped to get our Old Faithful pics scrapped in time for this post, but we were barely back from Yellowstone when we turned around and left town again!  We just got back today, and I thought that I would instead showcase some simple water-based products.

1)  Watercolor crayons.  These are so much fun! These are some cheapy ones a friend of mine received as a silly gift...  She isn't the crafty sort and didn't have any interest in them, so she passed them on to me. I hadn't played with them yet, so tried them out.  I just colored across a stamp...

misted it with water, and presto.  A beautiful, elegant, floating image.  (You can get a similar effect by inking up a stamp with Distress Inks and spritzing with water.)

2)  Twinkling H20s.  I loved these when they first came out--the glimmer, shimmer, and fluid graceful beauty absolutely drew me in. I feel like I am still exploring how to use them.  I've "painted" in designs with them, created color washes on backgrounds, used dots of concentrated color to create a 3-D effect...  but I wanted to do something similar to the above technique, that would build off of the fluid nature of these paints.

So...  I watered up each paint pot, swiped big strokes of each color across the stamp in different places, allowing them to overlap...

And voila!  A subtle, shimmery background image.  (This would work with any type of watercolor paint, you just won't get the twinkle.)

3)  Watermark ink.  Yeah, okay, so technically, there's no water involved here beyond the name.  And this is a very basic stamping technique (one of the first I learned!).  But that's okay, it's still a gorgeous look I love to whip out once in awhile.  (Simple is best in my book.)Simply ink up your stamp with a watermark ink (such as Perfect Medium or Versamark), press, and...  you're rewarded with a tone-on-tone effect, with your image a shade darker than your cardstock.

A few tips with these techniques:

1)  Water-based techniques tend to result in a subtle, careworn, or vintage flair.  Use accordingly. I find loosely drawn or distressed images work well.

2)  If you're coloring or painting directly onto a stamp, I've found that rubber works better than polymer.

3)  Protect your work surface and surrounding projects!  Nothing worse than a wet project when you weren't planning for it.  :-/

4)  Use a non-water soluble ink to stamp over the images produced with a water-based technique.  Especially if you are impatient like me and the image may not be completely dry! :-) Pigments are okay, best are archival inks like Brilliance, or something like StazOn.  I don't recommend dye inks for overstamping these types of images.

5) Have fun, relax, and go with the flow!  It may take multiple tries to get the impression you want.  I found it was easier to stamp until I found one I liked, then cut my card from that than to stamp onto a card already in progress.  ;-)

Now, go play in the rain!

Huge List of Handmade Flower Tutorials!!

I've searched the web and come up with a bunch of tutorials for making your own flower embellishments. First, one by me, from my sadly neglected tutorial blog.

 
 

Layered Flower Tutorial

Here is a long list of tutorials to make flowers from paper, fabric and other crafting materials.

Felt and Button Flowers

Sewing Pattern Flower

Tissue Paper Flower

Artsy Paper Flower

Dimensional Paper Flowers

Fabric Flowers

Scalloped Flowers

Spiral Paper Roses

Tissue Paper Flower II

Big Paper Flowers

Rolled Paper Flowers

Layered and Textured Flowers

Friendship Blossoms

Fabric Paper Flowers

Fabric Paper Flowers II

Phew! I think everyone should find something there to like! If you have a tutorial to share or know of another one anywhere online please leave a link in the comments!

Learn: Making Contact Sheets in Photoshop

Vernell mentioned that she used the Contact Sheet maker in Photoshop to do the photo strips on her page, and I thought it would make a good topic for a tutorial! Since our theme this month is Learn, tutorials are called for, don't you think?

Here we go. You can click on each image to see it bigger.

Step 1. Open all the photos you want to include. You can use a mix of portrait and landscape photos, however for this tutorial I used only portrait oriented photos.

Step 2. Go to File>Automate>Contact Sheet

 

Step 3. Enter all the necessary info.

a. Source - tell it where the photos are, in this case Use Open Documents. You can also specify which folder on your computer the photos you want to use are in, but make sure that only the photos you will be using are in that folder!

b. Document - I used a document size of 8x10 inches since I know that will fit on either a letter size or A4 sheet of photo paper for printing. I kept the default 300 dpi as the resolution. Check the Flatten All Layers box to avoid having to do this step yourself later.

c. Thumbnails - This determines the sizes of your index prints depending on how many rows and columns you input. As you change these numbers you will see the size of the thumbnail changing to the right, under the schematic. Don't worry if it shows you will have more photos than you opened; it only uses each photo once. I like to fiddle with the numbers until I get a size I like. In this case I made sure that the proportions were similar to a portrait photo (i.e width smaller than height). 

Choose either Place down first , or place across first if you have a preference for how the photos are laid out. Down first means the photos will be laid out in columns first, across first in rows first.

Uncheck the Use Auto Spacing box (I forgot to do this) and enter how much space you want between the photos. I usually opt for a tiny horizontal margin and a larger vertical one (for ease of cutting the strips apart).

Uncheck the Rotate for best fit box, unless you plan to cut the photos apart. If not you might end up with some photos in the wrong orientation. 

I also unchecked the Use File Name as Caption box since I didn't want those on there. I tend not to rename my photos so the names are things like IMG2765!

d. Then hit ok. Don't freak out! Your screen will start flashing at you as Photoshop goes through the processing. Eventually it will stop and you will end up with this result.

 

See that tiny little photo in the first strip? I didn't realise this photo was smaller in pixel size than the others, so it's a dud. I'll figure out how to cover that up when I use these on a page!

Now you can save the resulting file and/or print it out to scrapbook!

Here's an example of a page I've done previously using this method.

 

Check back later this month to see how I used the strips I made in this tutorial!

Have any questions? Please leave a comment below, or email me at scraphappyfran "at" yahoo.com. And if you use this technique on a page link me up!