Cards are fun too!

I only recently became a card maker...true enough! I think maybe I didn't know where to start. Or maybe just thought I'd rather spend time on my layouts. Then, I became a consultant and decided that I just couldn't claim to represent the paper crafting business and still buy my cards at Target. And I got tired of Target cards anyway -mass produced and over priced. It's hard for me to bring myself to pay $3-5 per card when, most times, the cards I make take less than $1 in materials.

Not only that, but it turns out that making cards is really fun! They're like little jewels - places where I can try new things out, practice new techniques. And they only take a fraction of the time that creating a good layout would. So, if I only have a little time but I need a crafting pick-me-up, I almost always sit down to make a card.

Here's one I made recently:

I made this for a friend and sideline who recently had a really awesome month. She works so hard, I was really thrilled for her success.

I usually start on a card by looking through my scraps. One of my favorite things about Close To My Heart is our palette of 60 colors. Everything they make is taken from these 60 colors. So, I know that if there's Twilight in one paper pack, it will always match the Twilight in another paper packet. That's what I did here...chose two random scraps that happened to be from completely different paper packets but they both have Twilight in them. (Which, in this case, I knew was a favorite color of the intended recipient)

It wasn't hard to choose the stamp set for this one - 'Shining Star' is one of my very favorite stamp sets. There's something so exuberant about stars. I mean, really, they glow, they sparkle, they shine... so I used that stamp set, added some bling (because you can't have a star without bling), and tied some ribbon on for good measure. All in all I really liked the way it turned out.

She liked it too, btw!