Card making on a budget and useful tips

Any one who reads my blog will know I have been making my Christmas cards for a while. Recently I decided to start making other cards too.

We gave an anniversary coming up so that was a good time to start.

Nice cards cost a lot these days so it is sensible to make them. The problem is I do not have many dies for birthdays and the like.

It is easy to fall into the trap of buying lots of card making supplies but that negates the money saving aspect.  For Christmas cards I recycle Christmas cards received in other years. I cut out pictures and greetings and I also use the thinlets dies to cut out the Greetings cut-outs from old cards as you can see below.

Hardly any one sends birthday cards these days so I do not have a stash of old birthday cards to use so I am short of materials for birthday cards. I am trying to be inventive. I have some old  blank white cards so I am cutting them in half and embossing each piece to use as a background to use on the brown blank cards I bought recently. They were 100 for $18 so 18 cents for a 5 x 7 card and self seal envelope. I think that is very reasonable. I did find an old Easter card we received many years ago so I used it to do a thinlets 'with love' die cut to put on one of the anniversary cards I am making. The other card I am using die cuts of various words that I have a die for. This die has many words suitable for birthday or anniversary cards. I used the backs of a couple of old Christmas cards to cut the words out of.

To complete these I will add some bling from the pot of foil shapes I bought years ago and will last for years to come.

I will buy some card stock at some point to use but for now I will try and use what I already have.  I have saved a foil packet that some chocolates came in to use with the dies.

I have ordered a couple of cheapie dies from Amazon that come from China, the delivery date is at least 5 weeks though but the price is right!

Now for the tips:-

Gluing the very flimsy die cuts to the card is very fiddly and messy and you can see glue residue on the card sometimes as you can see below.

This bothers me so I watched a lot of you tube videos for ideas. One suggested double sided adhesive sheets that you adhere to the card before you make the cut then peel off the backing after they are cut and are then self adhesive. This sounds great but the sheets are very expensive.

Another suggested using glue that dries matt.  This made me wonder if glitter glue would work? At the very least if there was residue it would be glittery and look nice. I had some glitter glue I bought years ago and it was still good so I tried it on some scrap card and used a pointy leather tool to apply it and it worked great. Too late for the anniversary cards but good for future endeavors.

Now for tip 2. This one I found on a you tube video and thought I would pass it on.

When you use thinlets dies that are intricate there are a lot of pieces that you have to pop out of the cut. This is messy and fiddly to do. They suggest getting 4 dryer sheets, flatten them out on top of each other then fold in half.  Then roll the die with the cut still in it on top of the folded sheets through the machine and all the bits will stick to the dryer sheets and the cut will come out of the die perfectly. Now I have yet to try this but it worked on the video's.

Well, if you are not interested in card making this is a very boring post so apologies but I wanted to record my progress.

What we have been up to!

 Firstly, I forgot before Christmas to post about the bowl cozies I made for my good friend and neighbour.  Here they are.  Never made any before and although they are pretty simple I do not really like sewing through so many layers but she loved them. 

For our neighbour

I also made a couple for us too recently, I just used scraps for ours so they are not both the same.

We also bought a newer to us vehicle as our trusty and loyal van is showing signs of wear and tear bless her.

This is the newer vehicle.

We have had some harsh cold snowy weather and it has taken a toll on the driveway and we were bringing home 5 gallon buckets of gravel to try and patch the potholes and put gravel out the front where the drive had to be dug up to fix the water pipes.  As you can imagine it was taking a lot of trips back and forth so we decided to put sides and an internal tail gate on the trailer so we can haul gravel.

This is one scoop

Much easier and cheaper by the scoop too!  We have hauled three scoops so far. We have covered a bigger area out front now than is shown in the photo with the car and filled up some pot holes.  Back for more tomorrow, we are having a day off today as it is quite tiring work for a nearly 74 year old me and my nearly 78 year old disabled hubby. But it does feel good to still be productive even if it takes us so much longer to do things these days.

Finally, I finished the hoody sweater for my great grandson.  There is no rush to mail it though as he will probably need to be five before it will fit him!  It said for a 2 year old but whoever wrote the pattern must have big children!  Oh well, one day it will fit.  I really like it just a shame it came out so big.

And as they used to say in the cinema after the Saturday tanner crush matinee, 'That's it folks.'  (Only people my age will understand what the tanner crush was lol).