April Cards for Charity: Hello From the Inside

Ha! A little quarantine humor. But seriously, I am finding that I have more time these days to catch up on projects. I seem to work in little spurts of dedication, interspersed with long periods of sleeping and reading escape fiction. How about you? My friend Pam is enjoying doing her Spring gardening in her beautiful yard. As for me, I did go out once today, to the front yard. It was bright, and I came back in. I'm not going to judge myself too harshly right now. I think we need to be good to ourselves.

I am making 10 cards each month to donate to my friends' church. They have a sale every February and sell cards to buy blankets for the homeless and for accident victims. 

My April cards for this charity came together very quickly. the front panels of most of these were something I got from a packet that was bequeathed to me by my dear friend Marj. She had these in her stash and left them to me. I'm sorry I don't know where they came from, it was an open packet of 11 pieces. I thought this was the perfect way to use them. They are embossed and have a circle cut-out and some flower cut-outs. I cut them down a little and went to find some already made backgrounds to adhere them to.

These are mostly glossy cardstock with different mediums added. Most of then have Nuance (powdered color from Magenta) with Perfect Pearls Powder added; some have alcohol inks, and some of them are not glossy, but watercolor cardstock. They are just pieces that I was playing with putting some color down in the past, and I grabbed them out of my stash.

I would say that I was not super happy with some of these backgrounds at the time I made them; but this project is perfect for that, since the background only partially shows through the circle cut-out, the flower cut-outs and around the edges of the card. This is a good reason to save everything, even if you don't love it at first.

I pulled out a background for each panel, and cut out a "hello" from coordinating cardstock. I got this super cute "hello" die free from Poppy Stamps during one of their promotions. It's 1690 Scribble Hello, and is the perfect size for inside the circles.

When I was searching for backgrounds, I pulled out 2 too many, and rather than put them back, I thought I would try to make up 2 additional and similar front panels. I don't have an emboss and cut die that would do this all in one step (do they still make those?), but I got out an embossing folder, a circle die and a little leaf punch.

What do you think? This is one of the cards I made the front panel for. I'm pretty happy with it. Did you notice that the close up above is this same card and a little different than the others?

At the end, I added different sizes of silver/gold glitter dots from Elizabeth Craft. These are nice and flat, so they won't make the card overly bulky, but they still add something.

Okay, here they all are, and I think they will be great "generic" cards for the church to sell. Can you spot the two that I made the front panels for?

The front panels are unknown provenance, but you can

make some yourself with white cardstock (textured or not);

 a 2" circle die; an embossing folder with some blank space

in the design; and a small die or punch to allow more of the

background to show through. The front panels are cut to 3 3/4" x 5".

The background panels are cut to 4" x 5.25" using the Lawn Fawn LF768 die.

The cute hello die from Poppy Stamps is only 1.5" long and less than 1" tall

I hope you enjoyed this project. Take care of yourselves, be kind to yourselves, and please stay healthy everyone!

Magenta Products used:

Various Nuance Powdered Colors

Other Products used:

 Poppy Stamps die 1690 Scribble Hello

Lawn Fawn LF768 die Small Stitched Rectangle Stackables

Perfect Pearls powder

Glossy cardstock

Tim Holtz watercolor cardstock

Various colored cardstock for die cut sentiment