Cards for OWH

I sold some home office furniture a week ago, and they came to pick it up today. That means over the past week I've been emptying out drawers. In the past 12 years since I bought the furniture I have accumulated a ton of, er, stuff. So this emptying out exercise has been very interesting.

The furniture was in my craft room, hogging one long wall. As you might imagine, since I have very narrow paths in there to start with, there wasn't anywhere to put all the boxes of stuff, so at first they filled the path on one side. I saw it as additional horizontal surfaces to place other stuff. Eventually, though, things reached critical mass and there were a few craftalanches. 

One such episode revealed an old pile of 4x5.25 pieces of paper I'd generated by disappearing a 12x12 pack of paper I bought by mistake. I decided to use the things this weekend and make them go away. While standing at my desk pondering my options, I spied a pile of die-cut rectangles left over from making this gift card book thing, and it all came together from there. 

Here's the piles of paper:

Patterned paper on the left and the stack of white rectangles on the right. A match made in heaven.

The rectangles were a bit larger than I'd normally use on a card, so I broke out some of my MFT bonus sets (the ones you get when you spend enough ... *ahem*) that I rarely use since they are so big, and got to work.  Here is the effort mid-way:

Mostly finished card fronts to the left, stacks of parts-is-parts and ribbon pieces, and an amazing amount of work space available.  Obviously I haven't been crafting enough. 

Here is a sampling of what came out. First, the Good Day cards:

I decided to use up some of my vast collection of brads and eyelets, but I had nothing to match this yellow-green, so these cards got black brads.

Here is a stripey version:

Next, a Friends sentiment:

I found matching brads for these. And a stripey version:

Next, I broke out a Birthday sentiment with a place to stamp either BOY or GIRL, so naturally I did both. First the girl version:

Isn't that a clever stamp? Well, two stamps, but still ... And I got them straight!

Since these were for a girl, I decided to use the larger dotted side of the paper instead of the stripes (gotta love the choices that double-sided papers give us, huh?):

The girl cards got a die-cut bow (die from Taylored Expressions). It's flat, and flat is good for OWH. I also miraculously found matching brads. These might be Rose Red, maybe.

And now the boy cards:

I deemed the small polka dots acceptable for a boy, and I used stars instead of the bow I used for the girl cards. Also, I decided these needed black brads, mostly because after a few of these with eyelets:

I was questioning my sanity.

So that's 26 cards for OWH in one afternoon, and I've disappeared a lot of that paper. I have a few more pieces of the patterned paper left in grey/gray and dark blue. I might make some manly cards with them tomorrow. :)

Thanks for stopping by!

Products use but not linked below: Taylored Expressions Basic Bow die, MFT Chalkboard Greetings, MFT Birthday Sentiments, SU white grosgrain ribbon, misc brads and eyelets.

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