New Cards

In December, Carey asked me to make another set of cards for her. She said she had used all but one of the last set I made! How flattering :-)

This time around I decided to make sets of three or four instead of trying to make 12 all the same. Making that many of the same thing was reeeeeaaaaally boring. So I've been thinking about designs and materials for a while, and finally all the bits and pieces came together today and I made a first set of four:

I'm terrifically pleased with how they came out. I may need to add an insert of writing paper--the handmade paper I used for the body of the card is fairly rough. And I need to find or make stickers for the closures. But both of those are quick tasks. The bulk of the work is done.

I used both drawings and text from a wonderful old book about fossil shells that I rescued from the library sale a couple of years ago. The pages are foxed, the binding had completely disintegrated, and it looks like it got burned (!) somewhere along the line, but the paper is wonderfully smooth and pretty shades of brown. The drawings are attractive and the text might as well be lorem ipsum for all the sense it makes. I put the drawings on the fronts of the cards and used the text for envelope liners. (Just went searching for the last time I used the shell book--I had forgotten that I watercolored the drawings that time. I'm pretty sure I've used it for some other project between now and then, but I don't remember what.)

I also used some wallpaper from a sample book that I snitched from the trash at the Decorative Center, and I discovered that with a little fudging I can get two envelopes out of a single sheet of 12x12 scrapbook-sized paper, so I was able to finally dig into a stack of paper that I picked up on sale at Michael's ages ago. It's a little thicker than regular bond paper but thinner than cardstock (what I used last time), so it made nice envelopes.

All in all, quite a successful day! Now I just need to come up with two more designs so she'll have a set of 12 :-)