Hello

The other day I had to come up with 2 birthday cards for some lovely little girls.  And I had about 10 minutes max to make the card and gift wrap the presents.  (Note to self: make a few extra cards to have lying around the house for card emergencies!)

One of the little girls had had a lovely time playing with my Stampin’ Up! full heart punch when she came to visit one time, so I’d bought her one as her birthday present.   So I wanted to make a card using that punch to give her some ideas of how to use it.

Thankfully I have a few fail safe card layouts that are fantastic when you need a quick card that is still effective.   I’m not sure what it’s called, but I call it a ‘punch trick’ card.  I learnt this from Sally Ann Williams, whose blog is definitely worth following for lots of lovely (and simple!) card making techniques.

Here is the card:

You can see I’ve cut a heart out of the front of the card and then another heart out of designer series paper.  (Don’t throw the card stock away!).   Stick the designer paper heart on the inside of the card and it makes a heart shaped “window” which can look really effective for a simple card.

TIP!  Don’t try and glue the heart on the inside of the card and hope to have the punched window and the cut out shape perfectly align.  It’s much better to close the card and stick the pretty paper through the window.  Perfect alignment every time!

I used some ribbon, another full heart punch from DSP and a punched small heart and faux pearl just to add a bit of extra detail to the front of the card.

You can see a bit better from this picture how the window and cut out works:

And here’s a picture of the inside:

 

Don’t think this layout only works with hearts either!  You could try birds, cupcakes, butterflies – or make a window to highlight a sentiment.  It’s a great card layout for using up small bits of pretty paper you can’t bear to throw away.

Here is what the same technique can look like with a butterfly punch:

[Sorry, those photos are pretty bad.  Must get my proper camera fixed!]

I mentioned that you shouldn’t throw out the heart/butterfly you cut out from the front of the card.   Stay tuned tomorrow and I’ll show you why not!

Thanks for reading 🙂

Caro