Creations Pre Blog!

Before I created this blog, I don't know how many cards I've created. I have to say the majority have been Christmas cards (I still have quite a few of those!) but there have been birthday cards and a couple of other special cards thrown in there - some I don't have images of anymore. Since the lockdown began 6 weeks ago in the UK, I had said to myself I've got plenty of craft supplies so I'm going to make a mountain of cards. Flash forward to now and I've only created 2 individual designs but 34 physical cards. One I can't put here yet as its my nephews birthday card but the others I can share.

I am a Brownie leader and in the current situation we are unable to meet with our girls. I decided that I wanted to have some cards ready to send out for when we are able to invite the girls back to the unit or if we want to remind the girls that we are here for them during this time. I decided since we are members of Girlguiding, our logo the trefoil would be appropriate to put on the front. The issue was how to do it - its one thing to print it out and glue it to the front of the card (and look a bit naff) but to do something a bit out the box for me was going to be the challenge. 

I printed out a couple of copies of the trefoil so I had spares in case I messed up, wouldn't be the first time! I cut one out and carefully created a stencil using a craft knife to cut the little bits out. I've never used a stencil before when creating cards so this really was a first for me. I got one of my ink pads and a round blending tool to dab the ink over the stencil. It took a good few minutes to get a good covering of ink over the stencil and when I removed it I was honestly surprised at the effect it had created.As the test stencil was just paper I threw it out and got to work creating two new stencils - this time sticking the paper to card before cutting it and the centre bits out. 

Once everything was cut out, I used a small amount of white tack to hold the stencil in place on the card before I got to work. I used one stencil with gold ink to represent the Brownie colours, and I used blue with the other stencil to represent the Guide colours (I couldn't do one for our Brownies and not our Guides). I've put some pictures below from the different steps.

Overall for the first time using a stencil I've found the effect it created on this project was brilliant and I'm looking forward to what stencils I can find to use next!