Handmade Cards

Well, I've been neglecting my blog lately. First I focused on getting all my Christmas decorations, my hundreds of ornaments and my tree all put away. Then over the weekend, I was doing some things, like making cookies and chex mix, before my son headed back to school. His nice 3-week stay came to an end on Sunday. (Sniff, sniff.) But now I'm returning to all the things I will hopefully have more time for with the holiday rush all behind me.

This wonderful book, Delight in the Details, was on my Christmas list and my husband gave it to me. I read it cover to cover on Christmas Day. Tons of great and different ideas for embellishing greeting cards, scrapbook pages, gift tags, frames, etc. Some different techniques are explained and illustrated very clearly. It's a great book.
One day over my Christmas vacation I went to JoAnn's. It was a day that all their scrapbook paper collections were on sale. I bought some very pretty paper collections and couldn't wait to try some things in my new book. I started with some cards.

Here is the first card I made.
I had never tried stitching on cards before, but after seeing this technique in the book, I decided to give it a try. Turned out quite well. There were some little flowers made by gathering ribbon into a circle, but I decided to do it with lace that was already slightly gathered to start with. I think the examples in the book used 12 inches of ribbon but since my lace started gathered, I didn't need nearly that much. And I saw some buttons used on cards, which I really liked. So I decided to start using up some of the tons of scraps of things that I have around my craft room.

I had a length of lace that I made 6 flowers from. I dug through my leftover button container and found some of these brown buttons. And I used up a scrap of this pink ribbon. I made three of these identical cards and realized it was great to put some of these scraps that I've had around for years to a good use finally. Here's a closeup of my flower.

If you like scrapbooking, making greeting cards and similar paper crafts, take a look at this book. It includes many great techniques that I'm anxious to try.