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Tag Archives: paper

I make! Baby rattle card edition

Welp, I broke my streak last week.  It had been nine straight weeks of crafting related posts on Fridays.  I couldn’t get my act together last week to get something completed.  I have half-complete projects everywhere though.  Anyway, we’ll see how long I can keep the next streak going.

So, we threw a baby shower for a friend recently.  Gifts were a slightly complicated affair, since she’s only in the country temporarily until her husband finishes Bible school.  Then they’re going to pack up and go back home overseas.  Or at least, they won’t be staying here, wherever they end up after he graduates.  So that meant that it wouldn’t make sense getting them big items, like cribs and car seats.  How would they take it back with them?  She actually said that she was going to look for used items so that they could just leave them here after graduation.

Well, if we weren’t going to get them cribs and car seats and other large items, it really only left the essentials, like diapers and clothing and bottles.  I am not against giving diapers to expectant parents.  They can always use diapers.  But the thing is, what if you have too many and the baby outgrows them?  It’s not like you can return an open box of diapers.  And as for clothing, I didn’t have time to look for stuff for the kid.  I was going to make baby shoes, and I still might, but I didn’t have time for it before the shower.  So, I opted for the ever wonderful gift card.  No really, I do think they’re great.  So long as they’re to places you actually shop at.  I thought a Target gift card would be fitting because they carry just about anything you could need.  They also have really nice looking gift cards.

But…I also think it’s terrible form to JUST give someone a gift card.  You don’t have to spend too much thought in buying a gift card.  So I decided to compensate by making a quick card for them.

I’m into abnormally shaped or proportioned cards, I guess.  Anyway, baby rattle in cheerful colors!  It’s actually a rather small card.  Not much bigger than a gift card (which was elephant shaped).  So I thought it worked out rather well.  I made a small envelope to match the card and stuffed the gift card in with it.  Tada!  Finished!

The inside was just a short note to the parents-to-be.

You can get the pattern for the card at the Silhouette store.  I modified it a little bit from the original, which should be quite apparent if you go look at the original.  Yup.

Swap: 3D mini petunia card

Yes, I participated in another swap.  It’s been a long time.  This particular swap was interesting too.  It was a flat mail swap over six weeks, i.e. one piece of flat mail each week for six weeks.  But…I ended up making something that was not flat for the last week.  Enter the mini petunia card!

Why petunias?  My swap partner is a fan of them.  I have rather fond memories of petunias as well.  I remember my mother used to have petunias in her garden when I was little.  I realized early on that petunias give a satisfying pop feeling when you pull the petals off from the rest of the plant.  My mother did not grow petunias after that.

Anyway, petunias blossoms are interesting in that they have five or so petals that are fused together (which is why they’re so satisfying to pop off the rest of the plant), so you can’t construct them like other flowers.  It’s hard to get that fused look if you paste a bunch of different petals together.  But!  I found this site, which specializes in making dollhouse furnishings and they had a tutorial on how to make a tiny pot of petunias.  It was perfect for what I was thinking of, size and everything.

You can find the directions on the site I linked.  They have pretty good instructions and photos documenting the whole process.  I did change a few things.  I used various weights of paper.  I didn’t do a paint dot in the middle.  I just used more white pen.  Or whatever colored pen I was using.  I made some various blues and golds as well.  My heart punch actually has a couple (which means “two” and is not synonymous with “a few”) different sizes on it, which meant I could have different sized leaves.  I also used green pipe cleaners instead of floral wire because I had it on hand.  And since I didn’t use a quick drying glue, but instead my normal stupid tacky glue (that takes forever to dry and that I’m trying to get rid of but for some reason it’s a bottomless bottle), the fuzz on the pipe cleaners helped keep flowers and leaves in place while the glue dried.  The fuzz also meant that I didn’t have to use any “soil” in my flower pot, which kept the card front nice and light and capable of standing up on its own.  Also, I like the fuzziness of pipe cleaners.

Confetti!

Assembled flowers. I do realize that petunias don’t grow on vines, but it’s easier to assemble when you pretend they do.

I didn’t get a shot of the flowers drying in the foam. I actually lost a few (more than two) of them in the foam when I accidentally pressed too hard with my stylus (it came with my Silhouette) and the foam swallowed up the flower.  The foam I used is actually marketed for making your own seat cushions.  It’s pretty cheap to get and I cut it up for various purposes, such as drying petunias or needle felting.

The pot for the flowers was made out of paper and some calculating (arc lengths, segments of radii)  in order to get the correct size for an enclosed bottom and some tabs for gluing everything down.  I think I even saved the template I made for future use.  I was going to make a more traditional looking terracotta flower pot originally, but I decided it took up too much space.  The card is only 4″x6″, after all.

Now remember how I said this was for a swap?  You know how swaps are mailed?  I didn’t have a small box so I devised this to get it through the mail.

I stuffed that into a manilla envelope sandwiched between two thin pieces of cardboard.  Arrived at the destination just fine.