Christmas thank yous

I've always instilled in my children that they should say thank you when someone gives them something. In the past we've had great fun taking photos and transforming them in to personalised thank you cards with Microsoft Publisher but now the girls are grown up I decided a more sophisticated approach was required. Inspired by the Docrafts Creativity episode 148 which demonstrated paper weaving to create interesting backgrounds for cards I decided to have a go.

I started with some of the Docrafts Creativity Club Floral downloads as one of the paper had patterned stripes which were a good width to work with.This was the result. And since I had some strips left . . . I made another one.

The little butterflies were a great find. Believe it or not it was a packet of wedding table confetti I found at Dobbies garden centre. The packet contains hundreds of butterflies in 3 different designs that can be coloured with inks to match in with your projects.

With lots of folk to thank, I then remembered that the Papermania Capsule collection papers had a couple of striped papers in each pack so I hunted through my boxes and discovered lots of different colours that I could try. I also realised that using a background paper with small dots on makes in a lot easier to line up the strips evenly. The next two days were spent making a whole series of cards in various colourways for all my friends and relations who had generously given us Christmas gifts. 

Most of the cards have embellishments made using various x-cut dies or punches. I have also recently discovered Candi from Craftwork Cards and have this in a wide range of colours so usually manage to find something that matches. I often struggle with making cards for males as a lot of my cards feature flowers and butterflies (in case you hadn't noticed!) but as we are still in winter I figured a snow flake would do the job so here is the male version . . .

The final one was inspired by the packaging on a bath gift set. I often get inspiration from strange places but a corrugated tag has to rank up there with the strangest ;-) Anyway, this was the card that resulted . . . 

Well that's all from me for today. Have survived my first attempt at blogging so I can now pretend I'm hip and trendy. You can see more of my creations in the Docrafts gallery where I am known as kINGFISHER (no surprise there then).