Less is more - spring time 1 ....

... the challenge at Less Is More this week is to make a themed card.  Chrissie and Mandi have chosen Spring as the theme - which gives us lots of scope, new flowers, baby animals, Easter!  To name only a few ideas.  What's really nice about this blog is that Chrissie and Mandi provide tutorials for the various techniques and tips they give us - and that's such a good idea.  This week there is a tutorial about using our PC to help with making cards.  Chrissie gave some  (really excellent) directions on how to use text boxes in Word.

It occurred to me that I used to use my computer a lot more to make cards than I do now.  In fact I used it a lot to personalise cards.  A few examples are shown below.

The first card is one I made for a friend's parents for their Diamond Wedding anniversary.  I didn't have any suitable stamps - so I played around on my computer with fonts and layout, until we settled on the design shown.  The photo is of her parents - I scanned the original onto my PC and then played with it in Photoshop and made this lovely vignette!!  The little diamonds were found in clip art somewhere on the computer, but they worked, so we added them.  I completed the card by added gems to the diamonds and mounting the picture on silver mirri card and some lovely mulberry paper.  The other card was super quick and easy to make - I found some lovely baby photos from Microsoft clip art, made them all the same size and put them in boxes.  I added some text in a nice contemporary font and then printed onto ink jet acetate.  Attached the acetate with brads and added a ribbon.

I thought I'd have a go at making a card completely on the PC!!  And then I remembered why it's been a while since I last made cards like this!!!  I spent the whole of yesterday afternoon messing about with positioning, fonts - getting Word to do what I wanted it to do.  This card is CASEd entirely from Susan and Viv - both beautiful cards ladies and gave me the idea to play!!

The card is printed onto fairly lightweight card (my printer doesn't much like card).  I loved the post stamp idea that Susan used in her card, so I decided to play with that - I made a table (following her instructions) and settled for a block of four.  Rather than stamp an image, I thought I'd use a digi - so the flower is a simple daisy by Pink Petticoat.  I added text boxes above and below the table and hunted for a suitable quote - fonts used are cambria (12pt) and Civitype FG (36pt).  I spent ages trying to decide which fonts worked best and what colour to use on the word "spring".  The design layout is all Viv's - thanks!!  I coloured the images with Twinkling H2Os - French Lilac, and added colour to the stems with a Sakura Stardust pen in green!

I'm reasonably pleased with how it turned out, the positioning needs a bit of work and I think the fonts could be a bit bigger, but it took such a long time and the amount of scrap paper in my bin was amazing!!  What I've learned from this exercise is that Chrissie is a genius!!  And that I need a printer that handles a heavier weight card.  I like the idea of making cards like this - I think I need to build up some templates which can be adapted to suit different occasions. 

Now, I'm off to look at some more cards on the LIM blog site, and then play in my craft room and come back with a Spring card that I've stamped and coloured!!  Back later.