Book Review- Pretty Quilled Cards

I enjoy the delicate look of paper quilling, and it's something that my daughter and I do together.

If you are a quilling enthusiast, or just getting started quilling, this book is a nice addition to a library. The author has created cards to cover a lot of occasions, and a few all occasion cards and tags with well written patterns. There are designs for Easter, Christmas, bridal showers, baby shows, housewarmings and weddings as well as components and designs that can be used for other things.

The introduction includes a list and description of tools you'll use and basic techniques and tips for working with the strips of paper. It also explains gluing the design elements in place.

Her style is uniquely clean, almost like drawing with curls, spirals and open shapes. The designs are open, spacious and stylized. Each pattern starts with a rating for difficulty. Under that is a supply list for paper, which shows how long the strips need to be and where they will be marked for folds. Great photos and instructions will help you create the designs exactly as shown.

My favorite designs are:
Songbird Greeting which would make a good housewarming card, or a card for spring or bird lovers. It features a cute bird singing on a branch with a little bird house hanging underneath.
Dragonfly All-occasion, a delicate filigree that makes a pretty and elegant dragonfly card.
Mother's Day Vases which has 3 vases with stylized flowers

All of the cards are suitable for framing, which makes them a nice gift. The end of the book includes some patterns for entertaining like a wine glass charms and place cards.

This is a lovely book, full of designs that can be used for all sorts of projects, not just cards. It's very easy to follow and one that I happily recommend.

Cecelia Louie's webpage- Paper Zen
Follow Lark Crafts on Facebook for lots of ideas, giveaways, and projects.

U.S.A. U.K.
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I received a complimentary copy of this book to review, I received no other compensation, and my review is my honest opinion of the book. You can read more about my review policy here.

Pink Flamingo Printable Cards

More pink plastic flamingo printables! This time, it's cards that can be used as mommy cards or calling cards and printable recipe cards. Both are in fillable field PDFs. To use them, just open them in your browser if you've got Acrobat Reader installed, and highlight the placeholder text and replace it with your own text. For the recipe cards, they are all set up separately so you can put 4 different recipes on them. For the calling cards, when you fill in one field, that field on the rest of the cards will fill in. You can save them after they are filled in. I always do my test prints using the Reader instead of using Acrobat to make sure it turned out right.

Print on card stock then cut them apart using scissors, a paper trimmer or a craft knife and ruler following the crop guides on the sides and corners.

Pink Flamingo Recipe Cards
Pink Flamingo Recipe Cards with some of my family's rice recipes
Pink Flamingo Calling Cards

Printable Valentines and Cookie Box- blue and orange

2 weeks until Valentine's Day, which means it's time to start posting some Valentine projects.
Click the images for larger versions. One is Valentine cards ready to personalize. Business card sized. The other one is a cookie sized box. Print both on card stock.

More heart themed projects
More Valentine projects

Leave a comment if you have a preference for Valentine printables. Would you like to see more business card sized Valentines? Bag toppers for treats? Andes mint slide boxes? Specific colors or themes?

Madras pattern printable thank you card

Christmas is over, and it's time to say thank you. I hope you enjoy these thank you notes in a madras plaid. They are 5 inches tall and 3.5 inches wide, and the matching envelopes are 3.5 inches tall by 5 inches wide which is the minimum acceptable for the US postal service. The cards print 2 to one sheet of card stock, print the cards, cut them out, and score down the center line to fold the cards. Write your sentiment on the inside. The envelope works best printed on paper. Print, cut out, and fold the side flaps in, then fold the bottom flap up and glue it to the side flaps. Insert the card then fold and tape or glue the top flap. Click on the images for larger versions.

For this set, I made a pair of madras style matching tiles using colors that were inspired by Pantone's spring 2011 fashion color trend picks. Here are the tiles for your own use.

I hope your holidays were wonderful! And thank you all!

Rainbow Birthday Set

Brand new template today! This one is for a card that can hold money, and a matching envelope. Instead of being long and narrow like most money cards are, this one folds like a billfold to make a smaller card.

Available with and without a Happy Birthday message, this set includes a 3x3x1 inch box, the card, and matching envelope. I'll also be posting the blank templates for sale in my Etsy shop.

Print them at 300 dpi. Click on the images for the full sized versions. The envelope matches both cards so I only made one envelope. Print the card and box on cardstock, and the envelope on paper.

Review-Page Maps 2 and a printable Christmas Card

Page Maps 2 by Becky Fleck is a scrapbooking book full of ideas for mapping out scrapbook pages and cards. 

It starts with traditional layouts and shows a couple examples of the layouts done completely differently so you can see how adaptable they are, how easy they are to customize by changing the shapes a bit, changing the colors and the themes. The next chapter is my favorite, cards! I like cards a lot, but I tend to think in terms of one main image, background, frame. The scrapbook inspired card layouts help me think in terms of layers of elements to create a card that more dynamic, has more going on, without being too busy or too much.

Chapter 3 is over the top layouts, busy exciting scrapbook pages with room for journaling.

Chapter 4, Beyond the page, has a bunch of great ideas and layouts for round pages, for art created to hang in your house including a calendar idea that is just wonderful. Clipboards, clocks and other artistic pieces using your scrapbooking skills to create gifts that take a lot less time than making a full album. 

The last chapter, near and dear to my heart, is about digital scrapping. Layouts combined with the credits under the photos telling where the elements come from make it very inspiring for people who would rather have an undo button and the ability to get just the right color element. 

At the end of the book are perforated cards that have a hole in the corner so you can put them on a book ring and have mobility with these ideas. You can keep the sketched layouts on hand for a night of scrapping with friends or just on your work table without it taking up much space at all. The cards are glossy, with the sketch on one side and a full color photo of an example layout on the other side. (Amazon link is an affiliate link)

Using one of the layouts in this book, I created this Christmas card. It's 300 ppi, click on the images for the full sized version. In the book, the original layout was to fit a 3.5 x 8 inch card. Because I wanted to make mine digitally with a matching envelope, I changed the size to 3.5x7 inch. This is a mailable size, within USPS limits for letters. I always recommend sealing printables with an acrylic spray, but if it's going through the mail, it's a really good idea just in case it's anywhere moisture can cause ink bleed.

Pretty little cards

I love One Pretty Thing's collections of inspirational links, and I like the idea of one pretty thing. The idea just got stuck in my head. I like doing little pretty things for my family and loved ones, and one of my favorites is little cards that are unexpected. I have an "I love you" note stuck to my monitor that my daughter left on my keyboard one day.
So with those two thoughts in mind, I made up a template for an atc sized envelope and card, then I had to decorate them.
Science is always inspiring to me. My husband and I watch Nova and Nova Science Now pretty regularly, we read science magazines and physics books together. So using a quote from Carl Sagan seemed like a natural to me for this project, but I included a blank card and a completely blank template. I hope you like them.
As usual, click on the images for the full sized version.