Creating >> ScrapHappy July

Hello, everyone and welcome to my ScrapHappy challenge for July. BBP (before back problem) I had spent a lovely afternoon in my craft room making a few scrappy cards. I am sure, like me, many of you crafters have quite a few bits and pieces of scrap papers lying around and rather than waste these scraps I often have a session to try and use them up.

I also found a box of ‘left over’ pressed flower heads that needed using up as overtime they fade and become too dry and start falling apart. So I got out my 3 boxes of assorted card blanks – (the brown ones were left over from my daughter’s wedding a few years ago) and began.

These aperture trifold cards are brilliant for setting off very simple designs with flower heads when set against a vibrant coloured background. I decided against stamping any wording onto the front of the card to keep them quite simple. The card on the right is a colour copy of a watercolour sketch from my sketch book – I took half a dozen copies and made some very useful Thank you cards and although my painting is not brilliant cropping and framing can do wonders for a little sketch.

For these cards I firstly printed out the Happy Birthday onto some textured paper using one of the new caligraphy fonts and then just decorated around the wording with a few of the flower heads.

I had a packet of tiny handmade paper cards in my stash that I had bought years ago and I thought they might make nice gift tags. So nothing is wasted I used some of the tiniest scraps of handmade papers to create the chequered background onto which I placed just one contrasting flower head in each square and collectively they now make quite an attractive design. Even tiny bits of fern can be effective when mounted.

Whenever I pick a fresh batch of flowers to press I always collect a few forget-me-nots they are my favourite but quite delicate to mount. As they are quite dainty I find they are best grouped together in some way for a better effect.

And lastly I always keep old birthday cards and salvage any useful pieces of wrapping paper from presents I have been given – they seem far too good to just throw away. Some of the cards I pass on to a lady in our village who turns them into ‘new’ cards for charity but I also crop some of them, re-mount them on scraps of printed papers or pieces of used wrapping paper that is still in good uncreased condition onto a card blank. Dotty backgrounds are always good.

With the cost of cards these days in the shops this is a very frugal way to make your own and anyone can have a go at making some. You can use any scraps of paper, wrapping paper and card to make some lovely cards – I keep a box of scraps – used old cards, pages from glossy magazines, pieces of packaging and wrapping paper to create mine – the only outlay is the card blanks.

Take a look at the other lovely blogs in the ScrapHappy challenge.

Kate, Gun, Eva, Sue, Lynn, Lynda, Birthe, Turid, Susan, Cathy, Tracy, Jill, Claire, Jan, Moira, Sandra, Chris, Alys, Claire, Jean, Jon, Dawn, Jule, Gwen, Bekki, Sunny, Kjerstin, Sue L, Vera, Nanette, Ann, Dawn 2, Bear, Carol, Preeti, Edith, Debbierose.