HCBC - 4 Thank You Card Designs

Inspiration for this project came from a friend and long-time supporter of my small hand-crafted business. The only guidance she provided was that she needed 50 thank you cards, ideally a couple different designs and sticking to a palette of blues, purples and greens. This is what I came up with. I created a time-lapse video (linked below) creating all four card types.

Angela's request came just a couple days before Bitten by the Bug 2 Challenge blog posted a new challenge, and come to learn it was a "Thank You Card" challenge; so I knew one of the card layouts would be designed and cut using my Cricut Maker. I recalled a card design that used hexagons (from Pinterest) that really stood out to me. Hexagons in Rainbows by I'm in Haven. The shades in this finished card fall in line with the MFT Color Challenge 112.

In Cricut Design Space, I used the basic free hexagon shape and used the alignment guides to make a random stencil pattern. I hadn't yet decided how/what I would use for the colors beneath the cut-out. For the sentiment, I used the SSS Big Thanks die. However, it was too big, so I cut it with my Cuttlebug, took a photo of it with my iPhone on a solid white paper background, and uploaded it to Cricut Design Space so that I could re-size it accordingly. I tried gluing individual hexagons beneath the template, that proved too tedious, so instead I used ink blending. To finish off the card-front I glued some of the left-over white hexagons to add more dimension and to fill out the pattern.

For the 2nd card, I tried my hand at freehand water coloring. I used Zig Clean watercolor pens and let them dry naturally. I learned the hard way about warped paper, and found this tutorial on how to fix/flatten the paper. I finished the various card fronts using heat embossing powder in both black and white. The shades in this finished card fall in line with the MFT Color Challenge 112.

I also used the Cricut Design Space iOS app‘s SnapMat feature to cut a single large rectangle around each water coloring piece. I did this only because my Fiskars track trimmer broke 2 days earlier and my new Tim Holtz guillotine trimmer hadn’t arrived yet. The technique was very effective.

For my 3rd card, I had a beautiful flower stamp in my collection for the longest time and hadn't used it much. So I inked it up with 3 different colors and stamped away. I also finished off this card with heat embossing in black.

For the final card, I also used Cricut Design Space. Angela is a big fan of all things Disney and I remembered seeing a pin (from Crafty Chic’s blog in 2011) about creating your own dry embossing folders using your Cricut. So following the tutorial exactly, I found using a cereal box worked impeccably. I look forward to creating far more custom embossing folders for my collection. For the sentiment, I used the Waltograph Walt Disney font, and the Mickey Ears are just a random silhouette/SVG found on Google image results.

UPDATE 3/14/19: My Disney-style card won the Bitten By The Bug 2 Thank You Card Challenge. My first official card challenge acknowledgement. :)

http://heather-bittenbythebug2.blogspot.com/2019/03/winner-of-thank-you-challenge.html?m=1

Check out my video below creating all four card types.

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