Birthday Card Making – Basic Grey Card Kit- Herbs & Honey – Arielle Gordon Design – Berry Sweet Triangle Card

 

This card I made with my mother-in-law in mind, as her birthday is in this month. Unfortunately, I have had very little time lately and I have been struggling to find even 10 minutes of spare time to do some crafts. So I made time to make this card while at work on my break. I have been very fortunate to have the Basic Grey Card Kits for the Herbs & Honey collection and Grand Bazaar collection as they come with card ideas and instructions to build those cards from designers. Designing a card and thinking of the idea is the the thing that is most time consuming for card making and scrapbooking – or any art, I believe. So it was great to be able to choose a design and just put it all together in a flash. It meant I didn’t have the stress of feeling like I was against the clock.

 

This card design is credited to Arielle Gordon and is very cleverly put together. First I read through the supplies list and gathered all the pattern papers listed and I prepared the card base. Then using the ‘berry sweet’ sticker from the title stickers which is in a triangle shape I cut a template. I then used that template to cut one triangle of each pattern and four triangles for the strawberry pattern paper. A strip of a bout an inch of red was also needed.

 

From there the triangles are used to form a pattern. When I was cutting out the triangles I tried to put the triangle over the parts of the pattern that I liked more. Such as the FR from the wood and red text pattern paper and the sweet peas of the green vegetable pattern paper. The strip of red paper was placed at the bottom as a border. The blank space is for the ‘berry sweet’ sticker that was used for the template.

 

The instructions called for using a striped bottle cap and the little yellow brad. I used the little yellow brad as instructed but decided to swap out the striped bottle cap for the yellow sweetness bottle cap instead. I thought it made the card a little sweeter. Tee hee (o^-^o)

 

I didn’t have my foam squares with me when I was at work so when I got back home I took 10 seconds to cut a square from my foam tape roll and used that to adhere the ‘berry sweet’ sticker. The instructions also advise to use a corner punch to round off the corners of the red border. But I liked the crisp edges so I left it angled.  I felt so inspired after making this card and I’d love to recreate this technique using different pattern papers and maybe different sized triangles or shapes. I think I might have to invest in a triangle punch or set of die cuts to speed the process along a bit.

Birthday Card Making – Basic Grey Card Kit- Herbs & Honey – Arielle Gordon Design

This card I made for my father’s birthday using one of Arielle Gordon’s designs from the Basic Grey Herbs & Honey card kit. I think it’s perfect as he’s really into the old school and retro. I began with a white card stock base and trimmed it down from the 12 inch by 12 inch included in the card kit.

I used the Martha Stewart Score Board and bone scorer and made the card top folding.

I gathered the pattern papers as advised in the instructions and then I trimmed them down. All the measurements are included in the design instructions.

Once I had the strips I adhered them to the card. But when I tried to place the banner sticker from the the Herbs & Honey Title Sticker Sheet, included in the kit, I found that I had the gaps between the strips to wide so I had peel the strips off and re-adhere them closer together.

After that I could place the banner down. In the instructions and the example image they use the whole sticker, but as most of the right hand side of the sticker is covered and you can only just see the bottom spike on the right hand side sticking out I decided I’d cut the banner in half and only use half the sticker.

The instructions called for the two of the bottlecaps, one made from chipboard and the other metal. And then strategically placed in the middle of these two bottlecaps was a sticker also from the Title Stickers Sheet. The photo doesn’t show it but there was also a small brad placed between and below the green bottlecap and the good times sticker.

My younger brother and I signed the inside and wished my father well for his birthday and then it was speedily posted off. Even though we tried to get it all done on time, it is going to get to him late, especially as he lives three states down and has an ocean border.

I’ve really been enjoying making these card kit cards and it really helping me get a greater feel for designing as a lot of the times it takes me ages to come up with an idea and I always forget about the principles, such as the rule of threes, when designing.

I think I should study the principles of design more in order to make the simple & clean designs that I love and gravitate to so much.

Happy Birthday Dad! Hope you had a great day!

Basic Grey Clearance Warehouse Box Haul Shipment Package

For midyear, Basic Grey had another Warehouse Clearance Box sale. I was lucky enough to grab one of these for Black Friday and whoo boy was excited for another chance as that Black Friday box was pretty epic. I was so stoked as the boxes are loaded with goodies and it’s a saving of $100’s of dollars.

Basic Grey really spoiled me with this haul. I got little snippet journalling cards from the Highline Collection, a set of stamps, alphas, borders, posies, buttons and lots of bling!

Now for the really exciting part, this really blew me away and I was so happy with the items that had been chosen for me. Did I mention that I have no idea what I get? Basic Grey just fill a box up with random goodies, you have no choice in what you get. I love that part of the sale too, as I get a surprise! It makes the unboxing that much more thrilling!

Look at how thick that stack of scrapbooking papers is! I received so many papers from many collections which I’ll picture all below. I received lots of elements stamps which are like $6 each! Amazing! And not only that I got not one, but two card kits! I love card kits, especially for the design ideas, but I was especially excited for the Grand Bazaar card kit as Grand Bazaar is hands down one of my top, favourite ever, Basic Grey collections. I’m too lucky!

So I’ll start with the papers! Three papers from the Mint Julep Collection. I have quite a few papers still left over from the Mint Julep Collection I got on sale at Spotlight, so I’ll probably add these papers to that.

Three papers from the Herbs & Honey Collection. I love that yellow/gold pattern paper.

Two scrapbook papers from the Spice Market Collection.

Four papers from the Second City Collection designed by Kelly Purkey a great source of scrapbooking inspiration and knowledge. I love the colours in the collection and super stoked to have gotten one of the journal card pages.

Two pattern papers from the 25th & Pine collection. I’m going to store these away ready for Christmas. I would like to do some really neat and special layouts for Christmas this year!

I wasn’t as excited for these two papers from the Fresh Cut Collections, but that’s only because I still have about 50 pages from this collection left from when I went nuts on Fresh Cut supplies for my scrapbook journal I was doing. I filled the journal up and I have heaps of supplies left. I’m thinking of making a second journal to use up those papers. It’ll just mean I’ll have a couple gap months between journal 1 and journal 2, but I think that’ll be fine.

Three pattern papers from Carte Postale. As nice as these papers area, they don’t actually inspire me much. I’ll have to have a good think about what I’m going to do with these ones.

Five papers from the Soliel Collection. Really digging the bright colours and love the blue and yellow pattern papers. I can see those two being used as bright backgrounds for a couple of layouts.

One pattern paper from Kelly Purkey’s Mon Ami Collection and one pattern paper from the Capture collection. I think these will be very versatile and useful papers.

Four papers from the RSVP Collection. I think I’ll put these papers together with some mini kits. I’m going to have to crack open the rest of my scrapbooking supplies and put some more kits together. Putting the kits together also helps spur some inspiration and project ideas.

Four pages of the Evergreen Collection another one of Basic Grey’s Christmas Collections. Again these papers will be going away into storage along with the 25th & Pine papers.

Three Basic Grey Grand Bazaar papers. Super happy to get some more of these papers. I want to finish recreating some of Kelly Purkey’s designs from her Craftsy Course – as with everything, it’s about finding the time.

Five papers from the Highline Collection. Again, super stoked about these pattern papers. I actually wanted to get this collection to do some layouts with my crafting friend as I think these patterns would be right up her alley.

I have quite a few Persimmon papers already, getting most of them in a previous Basic Grey sale and also snagging the Collection Kit for around $10 so I’ll probably add these in with those as spares.

I was surprised to get these three papers. Even though there’s only one of each as these are from the more recent collections, I wasn’t expecting to get any papers from these three collections: Adrift, Aurora and Vivienne.

And lastly to finish off the papers, one more from Kelly Purkey’s Mon Ami Collection and one sheet from the Capture Collection. I think this scrapbook page is really awesome as it has lots of elements I’ll be able to cut up and use.

This is the contents of the Herbs & Honey Card Kit: 6 x 6 pattern paper pad, brads, bottle caps, title stickers and a design sheet by Arielle Gordon. There’s enough supplies to make one of each of the cards.

This is the contents of the Grand Bazaar Card Kit: 6 x 6 pattern paper pad, title stickers, foils, envelopes/pockets and a design sheet by Becky Williams. I really like the simple and clean designs. As with the Herbs & Honey Card Kit, there’s enough supplies in the Grand Bazaar kit to make one of each card.

And finally the wowzer. Twelve sets of element stickers including ones from recent collections such as J’Adore and Vivienne. The other collections are: Fresh Cut, Jovial, Clippings, Paper Cottage, RSVP, Highline, Grand Bazaar, Herbs & Honey, Spice Market and Capture.

To summarize, I could not be happier with the selections made by the Basic Grey staff and I’m super grateful that I was able to snag one of these epic deals. I won’t have to get any scrapbooking supplies for years!