I spent hours making a card on Saturday. It's really a treat to have that much time for crafts, though it never ceases to amaze me how long it takes me to make anything!
I like the card. It came out nicely, and I'm going to put it in the mail today, but when I look at it, it looks fun, but unremarkable.
What actually does make it remarkable for me is that so many things successfully came together to make the card possible.
1. The idea. I happened to catch a card posted by Coffee Loving Card Makers on Facebook or Instagram, I can't remember which. The card is by Richard Breaks, a crafter I just started following. He used this sentiment built from a Honey Bee Stamps set called Perfect Blend. I was struck by the simplicity of it. Be Strong, be bold. To my mind, it's a perfect pairing with coffee-themed cards. With all of the coffee and tea-related stamps in my collection, I've been wanting to make more coffee cards for ages. So an idea was born.
2. The card shape. Slimline cards are a popular new/old idea in the card-making world. I'm not completely sold, but I wanted to try a few - lord knows I have plenty of business-sized envelopes to send them in. I liked the first one I made...
...but I didn't even take a picture of the final version. The kitties themselves were fun and easy to make, but cutting the layers was a nightmare of not quite straight or perpendicular lines. This is why I buy frame dies - they take the guesswork out of cutting layers, and increase the chances I will like something I make. After struggling with my kitty slimline card, I bought a set of slimline dies from Trinity Stamps. They arrived on Friday, and part of making this coffee card work involved testing the dies.
Now, I sometimes have an adversarial relationship with my die cutting machine, but I've figured out how to make it work most of the time, even though I hold my breath every time I send something through. The thing is, the machine is small-ish, and has cutting plates that are almost, but not quite long enough for the new slimline dies. Yes, I could do partial die cutting and run the stuff through the machine twice, but that adds to the likelihood that something will go wrong. But this is me, who hangs onto things long after she should. I saved my long Cuttlebug cutting plates that hardly ever got used in the long-gone machine because I thought they might be useful someday. On Saturday, I dug out the almost pristine long plates, played with the arrangement of plates and shims until I got my slimline dies to cut in one pass. Victory!
3. Stamps and dies. I knew I wanted to use big coffee cup images for the card. Since I have most of my stamps cataloged and tagged in an online database, I simply plugged in the keyword "coffee", picked out a few likely candidates, and compared the size of the images to the size of the three card windows. I landed on this set from Cat's Pajamas called This Could Be Vodka.
Most of the time, when I buy a stamp set, I buy the matching dies. I struggle with fussy cutting out an image the way I struggle with cutting straight lines for card panels even with a paper cutter, ruler, and everything else. For all two of you who read my last post which touched on this topic, my chosen set for the coffee card had no matching dies for the full images of critter plus cup - no physical dies, that is. But I actually found and bought an on-sale digital cutting machine about a month ago, and last week, bought (for zero dollars! Hooray) the digital cutting dies that matched. I'd been nervous about trying the digital dies the way I'm nervous about trying many new things, but I'd rather try than have the machine sit around and collect dust. And wouldn't you know, after watching many tutorial videos over a few days, I uploaded the cut file, chose the correct settings for the paper I was using, and the dies cut perfectly. Victory!
4. Coloring. Another thing I work at, but am less good at. As I was getting excited about my digital dies actually working, and getting my stamps all lined up and stamped out, I was thinking about how to color the cups and the critters. As I was clearing up some scraps on my work table, it occurred to me try paper piecing patterned paper onto the cups. As it happens, I do have dies that match the cups only, so I took a quick wander through my endless amounts of paper scraps, and found a piece of patterned paper that came with a magazine I bought years ago, and cut out some cups. And even though it's not a palette I gravitate toward, I found a coordinating color for the mat behind the windows and a matching marker to use for the cup handles. I made the bold choice to keep the critters white. I'm fine with that decision.
If there's one thing I would change on the card, it's the sentiment. The two sentences should at least be closer together. If I end up doing a coffee card series, I might use the same sentiment again, so I'll have a chance to play with design and placement.
