Card Making Basics - Creating Thank You Cards

1. Instructor Introduction & Class Overview: Welcome to the Skillshare class on card making basics, or you will learn to create thank you cards. My name is Kimberly Smith and I'm your instructor for this class. I'm a full-time crafter, stamping up demonstrator and crafting educator. I'm also known as the paper chef. And I have a YouTube channel and I'm also on many other areas of social media, including Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. This is one of several classes I have on Skillshare. Most pertain to paper crafting of some form or another. I also have brothers scanning cuts skills-based project courses. And I have a course on how to create envelopes. Now here's some of the projects you're gonna be creating in this class. Each card is just a little bit different. That's because you could take the same pattern and the skills that you learn. Just embellish it and use different papers and your cards. We'll look, we'll look different. The skills that you learned in this class can be applied to any card making project. Although we'll use stamping up products for this particular class, such as the hello beautiful stamp set, beautiful shapes dies. The mini stamping cut and Emboss machine. Certain embellishments and stickers. It doesn't matter what materials I use. You can follow along with whichever materials you have. Now, That's because the, the skills that you're going to learn how to create the card base is using card stock. You're going to learn to cut in scorecard basis. You're going to use any card stock you have how to create all these layers using designer series of paper and the basic white that goes inside. We're gonna die cut shapes. But if you don't have a die cutting machine, let me show you what dicots are. I might not be familiar with this process. If you don't have metal dyes, for example, you can use other things like punches and things that you could use for the shapes, other ways to create the shapes or just a paper trimmer. The idea is I'm teaching you how to layer up cards and how to embellish them. And that can be accomplished in many different ways. I'm going to stop between each section. This course is broken up into nine videos and I'm going to stop and continue parts so you don't have to wait for me to do all the different sections, but I will leave nothing out. You're gonna learn how to do the stamping and how to ink around the edges for dimension at how to use different types of adhesives. Many other things. If I make a mistake out, keep on rolling and you're gonna get to see how I work in real-time, how I create multiple cards. Because that satellite, that's how I do my actual workflow. I create multiple cards at once by doing everything in stages like I'm gonna be teaching you. I'm very happy that you signed up for my Skillshare class. I hope that you'll follow me and you'll be notified of other exciting courses as they are developed. And I hope that you're going to try out what you learn in this class because that is how you can inspire others and it's gonna be great will get, you'll get feedback from other classmates and myself. And you can post in the discussion as well if you have any questions. And if you're using different materials than I share, please share which materials you're using because we can all benefit and be inspired by how you take these skills and apply them to your own projects. Well, that's all for now. Let's get started by creating the card basis. We'll see you in the first tutorial of this class. Thank you. 2. Card Making Supplies: In this video, I'll go over several card making supplies you will need. Keep in mind, you can follow along with whichever supplies you have. But this is what I'm using for this tutorial. We are making a layered card and we're gonna be using all kinds of coordinating products, thereby stamping up. It's a hello, beautiful stamp set. Let me give you using the thank you for the thank you card from there, but we can just as well use the other in both mitts and I'm using the dice that coordinate, they don't come in this case. I put them in this case on a magnetic sheet. You can get magnetic sheets from home supply stores. You can also get some things. You can get it from craft stores, but you can also get something called vent covers, the ENT. And that way you can put your dies on there for organization. So we'll be using what we die cutting those and we're gonna be using a dye cutting machine, which I'll get to in that section. I didn't want to bring everything out right now. And on the table, you're gonna be coordinating colors of card stock. We're gonna be using basic white for the inside of the cards and for the sentiment. We're gonna be using black for the hexagons, but we can also create a card-based in black. We're gonna be using balmy blue and native Navy for the card layers. And we'll alternate between the two depending on which paper we're using. Because I want to make a couple of, a couple of cards to show you how easy it is to make multiples. We're using what's called the abstract beauty designers series paper. And right now I'm just going to go through the paper with you. It's a four by six style of paper and it's double-sided. There are 12 sheets and we'll just be using a few of them. But I wanted to make sure I showed you the whole stack so you can see how carefully I'm coordinating these supplies so that everything matches now on the other side of each piece, if a one-sided hasn't metallic look foiled, look on the other side, it doesn't. What's nice about pieces like this is you can also cover them with your ink, but we're just going to using two colors of ink right now. At the end of this, I'll show you some ways to go further in your card making skills and other things you can do. But we're just going to using lacking for our sentiment. So you need ink. We're gonna be using to put a little edge around our sentiment. Crash Carey. You can gather from what I've said so far that there are coordinating colors and that's what you're seeing in there like so I'm using the crush carry from, you can see it in the inside of this flower. You can see how the balmy blue is on these pieces. So I'm coordinating things and then I have this. Then you're gonna need some stamping blacks to put your stamp sentiments on. We might do more than one sentiment, but right now we're just going to probably stick with thank you. This is a little rubber or silicone mat to stamp onto. This is a bone folder. It's to help make a crease on your cards. You're going to need some adhesives. I'm, I have liquid adhesive, glue, dots, seal. These are just different kinds of adhesives and it will be will use them as needed. And I have these little dimensionals to pop up, popup your embellishments. Then we have, I have a pack of embellishments and I have some adhesive backs hexagon so we can use sticker embellishments. This pack now my pecs already opened. I'll just be using ones that I already have opened, but I wanted to show you that there's a whole package of what's called an ephemeral package. Ephemera is just a bunch of nice, fun things. Abstract beauty, they go with it. Just because they go with our colors. You can see just Jade there. The night of navy, you can see the different colors, magenta, madness. That's why I wanted to show you that, but my pack is already open, so I'll be using a package like this, are a couple of packages combined together. We have a die cutting machine, neck and show you yet you're going to need a tremor or scissors. But I mean, I would say a trimer is always better for carbon making because you can make straighter lines. I'll be raising the camera view can say better. I'm gonna be putting a cutting blade onto this. I was just about to change it, so I guess I can do that with you on this tremor, there's a scoring tool. You can pull that out. It's a stamping up tremor. That's the brand I'm using. Okay. So this one, I put a little S on it just to remind me that it's a squirt. It doesn't cut. And then I have blades to cut. I'm going to use a new blade for this course. I'm just going to go ahead and take that out. And there's a little arrow that goes up. I'm gonna go ahead and put that on there. There's a little hole that's bigger than the other areas and you can get to put that on. So now I have a cutting blade which I used to put a c on, but now I know it's cutting blade. They're different colors. I always put my cutting blade on top of my scoring blade on the bottom. If I use a scoring Blake, sometimes I just use two cutting blades. And when I do, I labeled one of them with the little dimensional, which is a little foam adhesive just to let me know. Okay, well that's the one that's dough. And I, the reason I might use a dull one is when I'm not cutting things that need to be precise, I might use my doublet and this trimer has a little edge that go out and we'll use that. And you can also use what's called an scoreboard to score your cards. And we'll use both just to get you used to that kind of tool. Would ask if you want, you can use something to help you pick up your embellishments with. If you have finding bones and it's like little Ryan standards or something. This is called a take your pick tool and it does helps you lift your embellishments. I have a little placement down there to stamp onto. If you don't have what's called, this is called a blending brush. To blend some colors, you can always use a little sponge Arbor. This is a little finger sponges, rubber. They are just a basic card making tools that you're going to need. You always need a stamp set or something for your sentiment. And you don't always need dicots, but some kind of way to get shapes through your embellishment packets, through your punches, a metal punch which we've used in other tutorials and things like that. Okay, so I will get started in the next tutorial. We're gonna start making the card bases themselves are gonna be making A2 cards. In this course, we will see you real soon, gather your supplies and follow along with whichever materials you have, will see you again soon. 3. Cutting & Scoring A2 Card Bases: In this video, I'd like to show you how to create A2 cards. We're going to create them in both balmy blue and native Navy. And then we're also going to be creating some extra layers for your cards because it's always good to make your cards with professional by having extra layers. I'm gonna be using two pieces of night and Navy card stack and two pieces of balmy blue. Our cards are all going to be vertical cards. That means they're gonna be, they're gonna be able to stand up on a table. But you could do you could do it either way. But let me just go ahead and show you the way I prefer to do it. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna, we're gonna open up this tremor all the way out like that. Just so you can see something. What I'm trying to show you is this that you can, that you can just look at the way that this paper is facing and it is 11 inches across by 8.5. So this is a typical this is where you're cutting. This is the line where you're cutting on 11 inches by 8.5. Know what that means is I can make two cards out of one piece of card stock. I just wanted to open that up for you. You don't need to keep it open. I just wanted to show you that we're gonna be laying the paper along this side. So it's 11 inches across. And we're going to go over to the 5.5 inch mark which is right there because there's a little ledge here at six inches. There's a little ledge which I like when I'm cutting papers. We're going to go to 5.5. We're going to use get rid of the Get rid of cutting blade for amendment. And I want you to use the scoring bleed. There's S on it. I told you that but it's just the gray one. Use the scoring blade and I'm going to go back and forth a couple of times at 5.5. So what I've done is I've scored the paper and let me just make sure you can see that in the light. There is a line that scored. Good. There you go. You can see it. We have skirted at the 5.5 inch mark. I'm gonna go ahead and do that again with the with this night of Navy paper. Native maybe card stuck over to the 5.5. That line is n squared. Now, you can see how I squared it. So what I want to do before I do any cutting, I'm going to be cutting some pieces and amendment. We're going to take one more piece. Let's take a piece of balmy blue. Actually now we're gonna do native Navy. I already have enough balmy blue cards card basis. And this one goes with a lot more things. So we're gonna take what's called a simply squared because maybe you have a tool like this. And you're gonna lay your paper across, 11 inches across, and you're going to score it 5.5. This is just another way to score. See how there's little ridges along here. I'm going to square it the 5.5 inch mark. And I just want to put that up there so you can see that this is just another way to do it. So let's go ahead and do that. You can see the line, well now what you're gonna do, put that over here. Remember we're going to turn our tremor back to where we are gonna be using this one, but that's the cutting blade. And we're going to turn our papers, should say not a tremor. Turn our paper this way, turn it vertically. So you're in the portrait orientation and you're going to lift up your tremor and you're gonna go to the four and a quarter inch mark. Because remember that I said the paper was 8.5 by 11. We're gonna go to the foreigner quarter inch mark and we're gonna cut, should only have to go down once and it's cut. Now we have two cards made it once. Okay, so that's how you make two cards. Now we'll do that, We'll do this one. School goods, go ahead and cut them all over here and not making this many cards, but we already have m squared. So we should go ahead and cut while we're here for and a quarter. Four and a quarter. I'm going to go ahead and let you see that a little better. There's your four inch mark and then these are the big lines are the quarter-inch marks. This trimer also does metric, but I'm just going with the four and a quarter. And we're going to click here. Click here. I should say cut here. Alright, there we go. We have our cards. Now you're gonna take, you can take your lead here. There's a nice ledge which I like to work on. And I'm gonna take my cards. I scored downwards and now I'm going to fold upwards. That's called the, I call that a valley where you score down and then a mountain when you fold up. Now I'd like to use the edge, the edge or the edge of your of your tremor. And I'm going to go ahead and get what's called a bone folder. And it helps me because it helps me. You can use either side of it. It just helps me burnish the edges like that. That's how you make your card basis. So now I'm going to just do one more and then I'm going to do the rest, take a break and come back with some paper where we do the layers. Okay, So that's what you're gonna do, burnish all the edges. What I want to show you this A2 card is now the card we have. And I'll say this again in the next tutorial, in the next section here, 5.5, right? Because we had just remember we had an 11 inch piece of paper. It's 5.5 by four and a quarter. Okay, why is that important? Because the next layer is going to build upon this. So I'm gonna go ahead and fold on my cards up, burnish all the edges. I'm going to get white card stack and I'm going to use the extra card stack that we have four layers. And that's what we're gonna do in the next video. We're going to create the layers to put onto this card. Will started hearing things together. All right, thank you. See you soon to make some card layers. 4. Creating Card Layers: I've created all the card basis. I've folded all the card basis. I'm gonna show you how they stand up. I really liked making vertical cards like this. So they stand up like this and then you can see the front when you give it to someone, they can put it on their mental, et cetera. I've made the car basis and now we're gonna make the layers, card layer for both the inside and outside. We have balmy blue and 90 navy. So we're going to take pieces of, we can go ahead and cut two pieces of card stock of months. But we're going to take pieces of balmy blue and night of Navy, and we're gonna be using the cutting part of the blade. Now, recall the card itself. I'm just going to go and make sure these are at the edge. Was four and a quarter wide. So we're gonna go ahead and make this this, these bases are these layers, I should say, four inches wide. That'll give us a little bit of a margin around the card. So I'm just gonna go ahead and make these four inches by five and a quarter. Why? Because the card is 5.5 wide. So that's why we're making these four and a quarter. I'm just going to go ahead and turn this around and make I mean, sorry, five and a quarter. So five and a quarter by four. You'll see what I mean when I put it together. I'm just going to hold this up before I get the white part and then I'm going to get back to it. We'll glue it in a moment but see how we just made a layer. The card itself as an A2 card, it was 5.5. It by four and a quarter. Therefore, this layer here was for because it's a quarter-inch smaller and now it's four by five and a quarter. I made four of these because I remember I made some extra cards, so we're just going to put those together. Yeah. But while I'm here, I always like to just finish cutting the rest of the card stock. Let's go ahead and do that. Four by five and a quarter. I'd like to repeat myself as you will find out, just reinforces the concepts. Save these little scratch you never know. You can stamp onto them. You can use them for trimming your cards and things. I mean, I don't save parts that are all die cut and weird shapes, but when you have nice strips like that, then they're easy to save because I just cut on that side. I just tend to turn around and I tried to do it the side that was never cut on over there, just a habit of mind, it doesn't really matter. But if you see me flipping the base cards around, That's why I always try to go with it. The side that we're doing is cutting some basic way, the thin side. To finish my last thought, you're gonna, you're gonna see me now do this a little bit slow motion. I have a piece of basic white. I'm only going to cut one at a time right now, just to show you something. Okay, so we have it for this is for the inside of the card. It's still four by five and a quarter. But what I'm gonna do is that piece is done. It's four inches wide. Instead of cutting this side off. I know that this side is flat because it was machine cut by the manufacturer. So I turn the paper over, I just tend to turn the paper over. I already have a nice perfect flat side. I'm going to cut along the side. That's just a habit I have. I don't think it really matters. It's like a miniscule thing because my tremor is also a machine cutting a piece of card stock. It's just not using the same kind of machine that was used at the manufacturer. Now I can just go ahead and cut two together. You'll see what I do it again. So again, this edges from the manufacturer. And then I cut that. I tend to take Mike edge that I've already cut and flip it around and cut this edge. But again, it doesn't really matter. If you decided to just leave it where it was. We put bottom line is we have pieces now that are the same size as these pieces. All of these pieces are the same, so it will start to adhere them. To show you how I don't need to cut anymore right now. We do need an extra little piece of scrap, save, save a piece for some dye cutting. Put that peck away. So what we're gonna do is adheres them. You have a few choices of your types of adhesive and what you'd like to use. I think by far the easiest thing to do is just to open up a card and take this white piece of card stock. And if you cut it and there's a little bit, you can tell which is the inside. If the blade left a little bit of an in-depth this case, in this case it's pretty perfect because I just put a new blade on it. I'm using what's called the CO plus adhesive and it has little ridges on it. It's just so neat because there's not any liquid glue. Just very neat and tidy. I put a little bit around four sections just showing you that in the light. So that is called CO plus. And move that away from the pile so you can see yourself centering it. If you keep a pile underneath it, it might be hard to center it. I'm just going to use both hands. Center that on the inside. And of course you can stamp on the inside as well, some flowers and things, but this is a very basic cards. We're not going to keep the cards plane inside. It's a thank you card. I'm leaving the inside for the message we're going to take, because this is 19 navy, we're gonna take a piece of balmy blue and put it on top. That same as, and now I'm going to just use, I should've had this. It was kind of tilted down. Hopefully, the glue comes out easy. So now I'm going to use rolling liquid adhesive. I used rolling adhesive. The CO plus is called rolling adhesive. And now I'm using liquid adhesive. Just putting some on there. Not too much. Not too much because I don't want it to ooze out the sides, right. That's your other option. Then you have many other kinds of adhesives. Like we could probably do a whole course on adhesives. And examples of that. There are things called tear and tape that you can portable. There are glue dots. I have some of these here for for the dimension, dimensionals to pop up things. But the adhesives, we don't want to pop this part up because it's a card layer. If you pop it up too much, it's gonna be hard to put it in the post when you're trying to mail something. For that for those reasons, I'm just going to be using for the cards and the layers, I'm just using these two types of adhesive. But for the embellishments we can use these two types. What I'm gonna do now is adhere these pieces. We have when we have a balmy blue card base, I'll put putting the night and navy color on top of it. And I'm gonna be putting one of these inside and I'm going to get to hear them. And then when we come back, we will continue this by doing some dye cutting. Okay, so you're gonna get yourself a piece of scrap paper, that's what you need. Next, piece of scrap white. And then we'll be doing some scrap black card stock in it so it can be scrapped. I'm just going to pull it out of the container and we're gonna be doing some dye cutting the shapes that we're going to be needing to use for this card. Thank you. 5. Die Cutting Shapes: In this tutorial, you will learn how to die cut to create embellishments for your cards. We're gonna be using a mini stamping cutting in boss machine. Metal dies from beautiful shapes, dyes some little plates to cut the cutting plates. We're going to be making hexagons. These hexagons will be making forced four different sizes hexagons and then some little half hexagons, maybe a couple of triangles and diamonds just to give us extra pieces to have more choices for our card. Now before we do that, well, you don't have to do this step, but I'm going to be taking, I'm gonna be using these 12 pieces. These are the 12 different designs of the abstract beauty design research papers. So what I'm gonna do is pick out the ones I went on the front of my card first. I think this one would be really good for hexagons because it's small patterns. After I pick out the ones I went on the front of my cards. Then I can, then I can go and make the other ones into hexagons. So I'm thinking, the more foiling the better let's do. I'm going to take one of these yet this one I'm gonna save for hexokinase because I really like the black and white pattern on the back. I really liked the front of that pattern. Let's see what's on the back of these, this one we'll use on the front of a card. And this one. And I'm thinking, this might be really nice. This one here with the goat. What we'll do is we'll take, we'll take those three. Because you can cut three at a time. We'll make those into hexagons. And then we can save these and I can cut some other pieces up later. Later we'll be talking about the front of the cards and how to decorate them. So let's just get into the hexagons itself. Now let's take out. You could cut them all, you can cut some. It's up to you. But I'm thinking, okay, So for the, for the background, hexagon will do some black card stock and some designers should use paper, will do different designs, then would then we'll have, I didn't use the size. I use these two sizes. Then this one cuts to hexagons at once. So we use this one, little bit of diamonds and some triangles and things and half hexagons, and then we need some white. These are gonna be basic white for this shape here. That's all the dyes will be using. And now we're going to set up the little cutting plate. I'll show you how to do this a couple of times. And then what we'll do is, and then I'll go and I'll create more shapes and start on some cards and then come back and show you how to use these embellishments to use this mini bus cut in both machine, what I did is I opened up just so you can see, it was collapsed. It's a little stamping up machine. It's called the mini cutting emboss. And I'm going to open up the plates. And now I'm going to create the sandwich. And usually it gives you instructions, different machines give instructions. So plate number one, and then we're going to use a plate number two. I use the scratch plate number two because that's the bottom side. And then I put my paper there and my dies and then I put the plate number three on top. I'm sorry, not plate number three. Another plate number two. Okay. Now we're going to take we need to put the paper down. Let's say we could take scissors and sort of trim how much we need. Just so we could do some big hexagons and we'll make it so this other piece will still fit in there later. We'll put this down. Let's just do two pieces of paper only because it's the mini machine. And then we also have more options for different size triangles. On a bigger machine usually put three pieces of paper. Now we're going to see, maybe this one would be good. This double hexagon. We'll put a couple of the little diamonds there. That's what will fit, maybe this little triangle as well. If you want to make sure things don't slip, you can put a little piece of washi tape on there, something that won't rip your paper. I'm not going to get at step right now, but that's sometimes what I do to keep things from slipping around or just make sure there's a little space between them. I say slip around sometimes when you're rolling this through, things tend to shift, but I'm going to squeeze this little and I'm gonna go ahead and roll it through now, you want to alternate the plates a little bit. It catches. They're not all going in at the same thing. If I alternate a little bit like that, then I can catch sea. They caught onto the little roller inside if I know an alternate them and I piled them up and put them all in together. Sometimes this doesn't run through is easy. I'm going to do that. Now our card is starting to take shape. As you can see, we have shapes, we have shaped for decorating. Some nice hexagons. These little ones just pop right out. I'm just separating them so I don't because they're kind of tight. So you want to do a separate them so you remember not to put them on the card like this. There's two layers. Sometimes they stick close together because it doesn't metal. I'm gonna lay these atom I met. I'll separate those later. So we have a couple triangles later. Here we go, where we have lots of shapes. So we're going to do that again and again. I'm gonna do it with card stock now. And designers use paper at once. You can either, I'm thinking in these scraps are done. Normally I would save scrapped, but I'm not gonna save. Now we need a piece of black. I'm gonna do some card stock. And what I do for the card stock is you can't fit the whole card stock through there, but what you can do is cut a piece of size you need. We'll make it a little bit bigger so we can do some extra things on it, but not bigger than the plate itself will have a black one. We don't want to cut it longer than the plates. So maybe something like that. Card stock and you could probably put a piece of design research paper under the card stock, but I'm just doing this to show you. I'm going take this size. This is the double hexagons. They're nice, but there's done there. Let's do that. You just kind of a range. It, It's like a little puzzle, putting everything where it'll fit. Now technically because we're covering up the biggest hexagon with our card in our design. We could technically cut a small hexagon out of the middle of that, or a small shape out of the middle because we're gonna be covering it up anyway. But I'm not really worried. I'm not trying to save on card stock right now and I think it makes things a little stable when you don't cut out the centers of them, it makes it easier to adhere. I'm looking for the top plate, putting the top plate on there. So now we're cutting the black card stuck. Even though I'm right-handed, I'm just using my left hand for today because the demonstration, it's easier to teach you and I could see better what's going on with this machine. There we go. Now, if, if you're if you're die cutting plates do get a little bit warped. That's okay. Actually that one didn't get work because it's a top plate. Little shapes. The bottom plate sometimes gets warped, but if you don't, what you could do to keep it from warping as you can flip it over, sometimes, flip it each direction. And then also one thing I do is I try not to cut too much, too fast. I cut some, then you set it up, set up the next one cuts somewhere. If you cut too fast, you get a lot of friction. I'm going to get a lot of friction. The heat causes the little plastic plates to work. I'm just seeing if I can't use that scrap here because it might be to fit, say something like that on there. So I'm saving that little piece of black card stack. And now I want to do with the white parts. Just going to grab a piece of white card stack and show you. We need some of these. They're going to be embossed a little bit. I'm gonna go ahead and just cut. That's the only part I need, the white part four, so I'm just going to do that. And then I could cut another one in a moment. That little strip. While I'm there, I'll just cut a little bit of a little bit of those little diamonds. Now when you're making cards, you're going to do all the different sections at once. So later when I show you how to stamp, we do all the stamping at once and we do all the inking and we do all the like earlier, we made these, we did these parts out. What you're gonna do things in stages. That's how you get a lot more cards done. I use some of the white for the inside of that. I'm using that same white card stack. These sentiments. Some metal dyes have a little ridge around them. And as you can see, this little ridge makes it look in box, which is really nice. And then we're going to even bring out that embossing a little bit more. When we use the blending brush to ink around the edges. I prefer to stamp first two dicot first, and then stamp later. You could also put your stamp images onto your paper. You could have put Thank you on there. This is again, this is a sample. You could put Thank you on there with the black ink and then you could have put this on there to center it and die, cut it and roll it through. I tend to, I like my processes to get a lot of shapes. First. I'd like to have a lot of shapes. Have them already, my diamonds, my hexagons, and among other things, ready to stamp and then I prefer to stamp later. I'm just going to have extra pieces that I die cut and stamp layer. So that's what I'm gonna do. I'm going to keep on making shapes. Have a lot of extra pieces. I'll even assemble a couple of the cards to give you an idea. And then what we'll do is we'll assemble a coupled together. You're gonna get to see how to to start laying out the design in the next tutorial. So we're gonna cut and that extra term, we're gonna decorate the card French were going to cut out the pieces of designer shares paper the size we need them. We're going to attach some of the hexagons and then I'll show you in another tutorial how to do the stamping and coloring around the sides. All right, that's all for now. Go ahead and do your die cutting. All the embellishment you need, and we'll see you in the next tutorial. Thank you. 6. Decorating Cards with Shapes: Now that you've learned how to die, cut your shapes to the front of your cards. It's time to decorate them. In this tutorial, you're going to learn how to decorate the forensic cards, and I've already done two of them. And here's the sample will go by. And here are two that I've started. We'll be doing the sentiments later. Here's one where I just put the little triangle on. Here are the card fronts. The first thing I want you to do is learn how to cut the size for your card front. And then we'll start putting the hexagons and shapes in there. So get out your tremor. Remember, just recall from the card basis we created that are the card itself is an A2 cards, so it's four and a quarter wide by 5.5 long. We have. Then the next layer was four inches by five and a quarter. Now we need to make this layer one-quarter inch smaller than that. So we're gonna now going to go to three and three-quarter inches or 3.75 inches, 33 quarters by five. And now we have a quarter. These are quarter-inch smaller, saved these little scraps because you can cut out some extra hexagons and things. Now before I attach this, I wanted to give you a little trick. Something I discovered when I was doing this triangle is it's a lot easier to use the ledge of your tremor when you're arranging these hexagons and things, especially on the ones on the edges. It's a lot easier to glue them when you're using the edge. So let's take this little triangle. When you're, when you're adhering something to the edge of your card, use liquid adhesive, but you can use any kind of adhesive for the ones in the middle. Let's put a little triangle right there. And you can just use the edge to help you line that up. Doughnut here, this layer to your card yet until later. Now let's take this one. Well, let's first look. Do we want to use this kind of hexagon? Or maybe this would not be enough contrast that one might look really good with the stripes. So let's use that one instead. Because it's the middle of the card. We can use the rolling adhesive. But liquid adhesive works a little better for the edge of the card. Make sure you tuck the sides. And for that one, we're going to put that in the center. Then let's just do a little layout here, maybe hexagon there. This one doesn't contrast. That one's okay. The other side. Reason I cut out so many extras. There we go. That one's a good one. A cutout so many extras because it gives you so many more options when decorating. We'll do a little bit. I'm just going to be using the liquid right now just because it's a little bit faster. Now we'll take maybe over here we could take, let's turn this one around and do. I'm just going to look at the other sides of these. We could do a diamond. We'll do a diamond up there. And we could take another stripe. I think that would look good down there. So we'll put these half hexagons. That one's nice with the gold side. I'm going to save that one. Let's see what else we could use. I'm gonna take this one away for a moment. When you have such a really beautiful background, you don't need to cover with busy patterns. You want something more solid. Now I'm going to go ahead and move this to the bottom. You can see that the bottom of my tremor, that little ledge line up things. Now we're gonna take this diamond I'm gonna put over here because that way the black offsets, the one that's up there, that hexagon, we need something over here. We don't need another hexagon, but maybe a 1.5 or one of these pieces. Now that's not contrasted enough. This May 1 work because it goes with the one at the bottom. I'm gonna go and turn the card and use this. All right, great, so we have enough extra elements on there. So what we're going to do next is layer up the inside hexagons. I'm gonna decorate the card as well. So let's, let's just look where we can lay this down. Possibly. That one. This May 1 look pretty good because it goes with the other parts of the card. I think we'll go with that. This one I'm gonna say For over here and I'm just showing you how to decorate this one. I'm going to use the black hexagon for this card and this one in the middle. And I'll be, I'm just gonna show you how I would lay this out. I like this, I'm gonna save it for another card. What I'm trying to do is get three hexagons on each card and then I would hear them and come back and we'll do our stamping. We need something that's going to contrast at each time we go up into a bigger size. So this one too similar to the one underneath it. But I may know what I think I'm gonna use that one. That's the same size of seven. Here we go. This one I'm going to put over here. I'm liking it. Now we need something to put on that card. I have a bunch of other, I have a bunch of other hexagons in my little container from this set of paper. There you go. So that would match. I'm gonna be adhering these and I offset them like that. Because when we put our stamped image, I'm going to have that going in the middle there. We're good. I'm going to be adhering these. We'll just go ahead and glue those down. But this one, I'm gonna be puffing up with foam dimensionals. We have this card is laid out. Just need to adhere. Thinks this card is going to look like that with a little bit of offset. I like how the stripes kind of contrast. A little bit like that. Now we're going to lay out a couple more pieces. Here we get, we have this piece which will be, that'll look nice. You can do a couple of black diamonds. Down there, went down there. Let's see if we can't find something to offset that hexagon, possibly that one. If I find a half, I really hate to use the other side of that because it's such a beautiful gold, but it's gonna be a good contrast. Then little triangle possibly up there. So we could go do this like that. I don't need this diamond. Could do that. And I'm going to put little triangle over there. Alright, so that's the layout. And I'm going to go ahead and hear those. This card. Then I'm going to adhere these the front of the card and I think that one but the gold because it putting it on a balmy blue, I don't think it contrasts enough somebody to take this whole thing and move it over and put it on the night and navy like that. This one, however, would look good because it's a softer cards. We'll put that one on the balmy blue. Then for these, I get to use some more fun hexagon. So maybe not that much. Use this one over here. This one over here. We're good. We're good. I think. This one I think that's good. I'm gonna go ahead and finish hearing all of these pieces. And in the next tutorial, you're going to see how we stamp the sentiment and ink around the edges. So we'll see you again real soon. Thank you for watching. 7. Stamping Sentiments & Blending: Now that we've created our card fronts, it's time to do some stamping and inking around the edges of the sentiments. Going for something like this. And I'll show you different ways to accomplish that and different ways to put little borders around your stamp. Your stamp. Let's start with, well, let's start with the Crush carry for a moment because I might, it might be easier than the black won't smear. So I'm going to open up the crash, scary. I'm going to put a little bit of ink on the stamping block. That helps me when I'm using my blending brushes. I know how much I'm putting on my blending brushes. Then I tap the first little blob off onto the mat. And then what I do is I go around these little sentiments instead of anchor on the edges. Or you could, I'll show you a couple of ways to do it. I'm gonna incur on edges. After a couple of edges, I'm going to dip into the ink again, tap off a little blob so it's not too dark. If you end up getting blobs of ink, it's okay because you can cover them with embellishments and things. All right, so that's one way, so that gets around the outside. Let's do that again. I'm just using my little silicon met here. It just helps me. Especially when I'm doing sentiments that really helps me. I'm just showing you again because I want to show you in real time. That doesn't take very long. So there's one way and I'm going to just put these on the back of one of my pieces of night and navy so you can see the difference between doing that and not doing that. Okay, So it just, it just gives you a nice extra depth and you already have a little border from the die, so why not ink it up? All right, so that's one thing you could do. Now let's show you some of the things that's due. By the way, when we do you're stamping later. If you mess up your stamping, you can always stamp on the other side. It's always a little trick. Tips and tricks in my classes. All right, now let's enter their thing we can do. It's just a tip off the blob and then I could just sort of do have or just de-register should say not have. Like that should be enough to do the other side here. That's another effect and I think that was the kind found my example. I think that would be close to what I did it for the example. Now you're putting the weight in the middle. The crushed carry on the outside. That looks good. Let's try. Now. We could just do the half and half. So we could do tap it around. And we can just have that one came out kind of dark because again, this is why I have a lot of these. If I cut out. So there we go. That's more like the color. You can do a little ombre effect. That's another way of doing it. We'll probably use all these cards. It's all good. You can also do this after you stamp tool if you're not sure what colors I'm I going to be using, I'm gonna do it now at the bottom half. Say, what am I doing? What am I, what colors and what color inks should I use? Well, if you have a bunch of these done, we know that crushed carries one of the coordinating colors. But then you're not sure what colors you're going to use for the ink, for the sentiment, then you can just do that part later. I'm just going to go back to doing the sides again. And if you want, you can take your blending brush and hold your finger over the top of it to remember, I said there's other tools you could use. You could use if you don't have this blending brush, you can use little sponge Arbor, wash them out between, let it dry. And then you can use the SpongeBob or dip it into the ink or a dip it onto your stamping block. Alright, let's see you get the other side that up a little bit. All right, so now we have the edges done, done with the crash Carey. We're going to take the black, I'm going to do the stamping and take the black lid off the Momento black. Let's get a stamping black and we're gonna take the hello beautiful stamp set. We're gonna take the thank you out. Don't worry that your stamps gets stained. That means that I was using a lot of reddish colors. Maybe I was using magenta madness on there. It tends to stay in your ink so you can take stamping black and put it flat side up and then tap it into your ink before you stamp onto your actual pieces of basic white card stock. I like to, I like to ink this up, stamp it a couple of times onto the mat and I call that conditioning my stamp. Then I stamp onto the thing I'm actually stamping. That means that I know that my sentiments right-side-up, that I get good ink coverage, that the ink has a lot of ThinkPad has a lot of ink on it, will show you what these look like in a moment. There's a few reasons I do that. Especially if your ink pad is new and it's really juicy. You want to try this tapping onto your mat first. Getting more than enough sentiments done and I put them into what I call my bucket of crafty goodness so that I have extra sentiments already stamped for quick little projects and things. It just helps me. When I'm into mass-producing cards. There we go. Now we have that stamped and we can close. I like this kind of ink. It's a hybrid ink, so meaning I can use my alcohol blends markers when I'm coloring in stamped images, I can use my my regular markers. I can use regular ink. So that's why I like that. Let's put these all here so you can see them. Then I'm going to show you how I'm going to attach them to the cards and then I'm going to go ahead and do that off camera so that just save you a little bit of time. So here we go. There we go. We have eight of these. Eight of these all suitable for using for our cards. And I'm gonna take, I'm gonna take dimensionals. I want to point out a couple things. So this one had an extra hexagon. So we have three layers of hex guys. This has 33 and this one has two, and then this one has three. So it doesn't really matter. Then this one has the widest hexagon. See, this one has a lot of colors. This one has a lot of color. Let me just share. For that one, I would probably use since it has a lot of color. Like this one that's pretty light seat because it contrasts with that C. But then for this one with a lot of white, I might use one that has some darker parts, like maybe this one would look good there or this one here with this effect. I think something like that. Just kind of put the ones there so you can have good contrast with the hexagon and this one, it really wouldn't matter. Let's go ahead and put this on there. Then two it to attach that I'm going to put two-dimensional xs on their popup this. Then we still have our final embellishments. We need to put on embellishments from our ephemeral pack and some stickers. So we'll come back and do that. I'm gonna go ahead and attach the rest of Sentiments. Hope you enjoyed this tutorial for part as part of your class. And that you're following along with your materials and creating some cards along with me. Thank you for now. We'll see you soon. 8. Embellishing Cards: I've attached all the stamp sentiments to the cards, and now it's time to embellish our cards. Using both the ephemera pack. I may even open a new FMR pack. I'm just not sure yet. We'll see if we need any of these using some of this ephemera and then some of these adhesive hexagon stickers like to do those little hexagons in odd numbers of three or five. So let's just take this first one. It's very busy already. Doesn't need a whole lot. But we can always add little flower. Let's say we have a couple of different choices. We have these pumpkin pie flowers and there's already a lot of pink in there. So I think I'll go with this one. See where to put it. Just kind of move it around and there's little little places to put it and where it doesn't block the other sentiment. Let's see. Just experiment with it. There you go. That's where I'm going to put it. Now we're gonna take this little dimensional, put it behind there. And if you want, you can use your take your pick tool to get that off of there. I'm even going to yeah, I'm even going to touch it up there a little bit that can make it go up higher. Okay. So there you go. I'm thinking there's just so much going on on that card that I don't really need a lot of other ephemera. I mean, if I want a little bit of bleeding or an extra extra one of these little gold things I can't on a car, but the thing is there's so much gold foiling already, so I don't really need that. So I'm saying I'm just going to go for I'm gonna stop there. I mean, that's actually sometimes it's not usually my style. I never usually say enough is enough, but that one really is enough. We're going to take some adhesive back hexagons. And I'm gonna go with a big one right up here in this area because that's a big blank white area. We'll put one there. And then we see how there's three sizes of these. So I'm going to now put a blushing bride, one that was just Jade will go with the blushing bride. Somewhere in here. I don't want to go straight down from that one, maybe at an angle over here. And then we'll put whenever there we'll put the black one will go for a small black one. Because we've already done the other two sizes and there you go. I mean, that's all it really needs. Three of those flower. I'm happy with this guard. It is embellished enough. Let's get one that doesn't have as much gold on it. See, this one? This one doesn't have a lot of gold. So this one, I would take these little leaves then use them for that. I have glue dots, mini glue dots. Going to see how far down it goes this. Where do these start? Around in Rome, they go where it stops. Nobody knows. Here we go. This one is used up, so let's go for this. I'd like to take my glue dots and put them on on the role. I take the embarrassment and put it onto the role. That just helps me get them offset and put one there and one there. And I'm gonna go for it. I'm gonna put it down kind of curves. So I'll put one over here. Now. We'll get, we'll get that little pink flower that we had a minute ago. Now this one needs a little bit extra in, but there's a pink flowers. So I'm gonna put that, that maybe up here will look good. When you have, you can either use mini dimensionals or you can cut your bigger dimensional, smaller for that. Now, I'm thinking another one of these. Maybe we'll go for the star. Now sometimes when you pop things out of these packages, packages, there's a little bit of let me see if there's any. Sometimes there's like little nibs sticking out and you can use a little nap, how to get them off? Sometimes I just trimmed decides that one I can't really tell. Not so bad, but it could be my eyesight is going in my age. Okay, let's put the star over there. So now we have some three things going on. We get the little gold pieces and now we'll put some femora. Need to take your pick tool this time I'm going to start with the black poses, a very black dominated card. There's not a lot of black on this side, so we'll put one over here. And then we've already, we've used the small one. Now let's go for we'll do the medium one in this time. And just Jade. I'm going to put one right inside this hexagon. Sometimes I like to put them inside of the hexagons. And now we can go for the large one. Put that up there. I used that odd number again. I did 123, those 123 the hexagons. All right, Let's keep going. This one needs some color because this one has the blink now. It needs the color. That might not contrast very well, but we can use that. Note that flag is a little bit, that flag is a little bit too. Black and white already. We have a lot going on. This is what I meant by this little this little nibs. Sometimes when you punch it out, you see the little nibs sticking out. Alright, so we're gonna go for a pink flower up there because this one needs some color. Get the dimensionals. And we will do big dimensional. I'm going to put two leaves down. I'm going to do it. I'll do a gold one and just Jade one. I think I might do it Go on. I mean, I'm not sure. It just depends on if it's a contract, if I can put it wherever contrast. Yeah. Yeah. That'll work as long as I put it down here and not on top of the other gold part. You can see when you use coordinating products, you already know everything is going to line up and look good. Not really line up with, you know what I'm saying? Coordinate. It's going to coordinate, so it's going to look good. You don't have to worry about, will this look good? Will this be good on my project? Let me go do something like that. Even though it's kind of abstract rate, we're gonna put it like that. It has to go like that because that's the way the pattern goes. And then we'll put the flower here. We've already, we've already put one on there. All right. So we have that. We've got some color going on. Don't want to do another flower. I think it is time to open my other pack because I did say ahead of time, I think this one needs a heart. This is what the package looks likes. Flow package. Let's take a heart out of here. Have a heart. I'm going to go for this. I'm going to go maybe down there or could put it on top of hexagon. Let's say. That might look cute. Okay, We'll put it on top of this hexagon with a mini dimensional. I'm just seeing if this other heart would be okay Somewhere. Take the backup for that because it's already loose. There's one there. I'm going to put the other one up there and that hexagon. Here we go. Now it's time for some of these other kinds of hexagons. We have a lot of just Jade going on already there, so It's okay, but we'll put it up here. The big one, we're going to go for a medium one family to put that right inside this little diamond shape. Then a black one. Yeah, you can see that's how I decorate. I just go for it. I just go for it and I think I could even use five of those or I could use a couple of other pieces here. I'm just gonna go for five of these. So I've used a jade that was that size already, so I'm gonna go for one that's that size. Let's move it over. Well actually, I'll just leave that one in. We'll go for a big one. There you go. So it's an odd number. You can't really get them off again, so I'm liking it. So that's my third card. I have a couple of more cards to decorate. Well, I have one more card to decorate. This one is already decorated from before. I will go ahead and decorate this real quick and then we'll come back for the conclusion where I show you other projects I created with this abstract beauty collection, which is a really good collection. And I have a lot of other projects aside from the cards. So we're just gonna go for three hexagons, maybe a flower or a star, I think, and it doesn't even need a flower. I mean, maybe do a little star. Not all cards need a flower. There's somebody so much going on with that paint, painted foiled background. I like a lot of embellishments. I mean, that's that's my personal style, but you just do it you're most comfortable with. I don't want to keep holding that big one. All right. Where to put this guy? Where to put? It could go right there but it doesn't kind of an awkward spot thinking, let me put it over here. We have the hexagons and I'm going to go for maybe this little tiny star ethically dot. There you go. That's done. I'm going to clean up the table. I'll see you soon. We'll wrap up this whole, entire class. You're going to get to see some more projects. I have one more card I actually, I've been working on throughout this course two, which has a little bit of extra paper. And then I'm gonna go ahead and finish that before I come back. All right. We'll see you real soon. Thank you for your attention. 9. Finished Thank You Cards & Abstract Beauty Projects: This is the last section of the class and I'd like to share the finished projects with you that you learned how to create other projects from the abstract beauty collection and where to get some more supplies and knowledge on this collection. All right, so here's, here we go. These are, we learned how to create carb basis. This is the balmy blue with the night of Navy, learned how to die, cut out the shapes to put on the card basis, and we learned how to layer up both card stock and designer series paper. Then we learned how to stamp ink around the stamp so that it adds dimension and you don't have to embellish your card. Those are basic card making skills you can learn and apply to any thing that you do in card making. And you got to see my little quirkiness along the way. And as I made mistakes, as I made design design decisions, that's a tongue twister. You got to see why I did the things I did and how I tried to combine the colors, shapes, and patterns. The only thing I planned out ahead of time was the actual design and layout of the card. And we'd create, we recreated that. I had one created and then we made for more five total, just like that with that pattern. Those dimensions you learned can be applied to all of these cards. And then I just want to show you what I did with some scraps. Here are the cards we learned how to create these thank you cards. Then these scraps, I took the little scripts at the edge and I put it on. You can put a little belly band across the middle of your card just for one extra layer. Other than that, it's the same card. And this was one I was creating us along the way because I lived really like this little pretty floral pattern. Along the way. I just added pieces as I went along and had extra pieces and that's what I created. All right, Now I'm going to share some other cards with you. I do have a YouTube channel called Paper CEF, PAP RED not pampered, papered PAPR because I craft with paper. You can look me up or you can look up Kimberly Smith on YouTube. And I have what's called a workshop series. And in my workshop series I do multiple videos and about ten projects. These are some of the ones we do, shaker card. We do how to layer cards. This is a watercolor project and some embossing that series, this is a designer series paper panel card. Here are ones I've already shown on YouTube. This was an introduction to the abstract beauty collection and using designer shoes paper to layer Picard. Very similar to what you learned in this course, but the dimensions you'll be different. When I do, when I do workshops series on YouTube, I have kits that my customers in the US can purchase and things like that to follow along with different supplies. Here, here's what I created was something called the abstract beauty cards and envelopes. These, these packages of cards and envelopes came in a kit and then I just added the extra embellishments like you saw me do in this course, in this class. The word class course tutorial. I'm using those terms interchangeable because I do teach on a lot of different platforms. Here's another one within boss background. Here's a bookmark and tag treat that I'm using a punch for. It's called a fancy tag toupper punch and balmy blue card stock. And that's how I usually end my series by creating some tags and different kinds of treat holders. And then here's something else I'm doing in that series. There's a watercolor box. This is a mini paper pumpkin box or the watercolor front, and then a card, a note card that goes inside the box. And then finally here is a box for, that holds a mask and I really liked the sentiment, I miss your face. And this was a box I created to hold a face mask because I miss your face, which is relevant in the Times today, but who knows when you're watching this course? Here's the abstract beauty, sweet, by stamping up in all the different pieces and parts that I used. I used every bit of it except for this part. I used all the bits with you and then this part was the one I just showed you those cards and envelope peck, closer, look at the sentiments. No matter when you're watching this course, it could be years from now. You may find that you can find similar materials at papered chef that stamping up that net. That's my stamping APP store. Or if you are watching this in the year 2022, this catalog is good until June 30th, 2022. That's the catalog where you can get these at tech products and I'm not sure if there'll be available after that. I'd never know what will carry over. But usually usually things don't carry over to New catalogs. They're limited and exclusive. You can find me on Instagram at paper chip. That's my just put the at sign and paper check and you can find me on Facebook, YouTube, and other social media platforms. I have a Pinterest page and etc. I hope you'll stay in touch and follow me and I follow you back so you can get notified of future crafting courses I'm having. And I do specialize in the scanning cut and have scanner cut courses on this platform skillshare. And I have them on another platform called Udemy. That's all for now. I appreciate your attention in this class and I hope you learned a lot. If you liked it. Please give me some feedback and review. Have any suggestions for improvement. Also, please feel free to fill out that feedback questionnaire. Thank you. This is the paper check. That's all for now.