Hi everyone, it’s Elsie here! For today’s post I’m going to show you how I customized some of the pre-made greeting cards and envelopes that American Crafts has to offer. Although I love making cards from scratch, it’s always useful to have some pre-made ones in my stash for when I need an ‘emergency card’ to send!
As you would expect from American Crafts there are tonnes of different designs, styles and sentiments, so they’ve got you covered for whatever occasion you need a pretty card for! But with these simple tips and tricks, you’ll be sending out one-of-a-kind cards in no time at all!
To personalise your cards you don’t have to do anything too complicated. For example, on the birthday card with the cat holding a cupcake, I simply added some adhesive rhinestones around the wreath and on the cat’s crown. This adds some lovely bling and sparkle to a previously flat card.
I also added the same rhinestones onto the centre of the flowers on the ‘congrats’ card. Except this time I decided to do some hand-stitching around the sentiment. Stitching on your cards is a really inexpensive way to personalise them. Obviously hand-stitching isn’t the quickest way to personalise your cards, but it’s well worth the effort as there’s a definite “wow-factor” to the end result.
To cover up the stitching on the inside of the card, I adhered some patterned paper over the back of the front panel. This gives a clean and professional look, which is handy if you’re not a very neat stitcher like me! Also if the cards are blank on the inside, you can easily use a sticker to create a bold sentiment.
I had a few Dear Lizzy Stay Colorful fussy-cut butterflies leftover from a previous layout, so I decided to use them on the birthday cake card. Because this card already had some gold foiling on it, I echoed that by gluing some tangled gold thread underneath the butterflies to give some lovely shiny texture!
You can also use pens and markers to personalise the greeting cards. On the dinosaur card I used the Vicki Boutin white paint pen to outline the dinosaur and speech bubble because I felt that they weren’t standing out enough against the teal background.
I also managed to create two cards from one card as you can see from the ‘happy birthday’ and ‘high five’ card set. I used a circle die to cut out the happy birthday sentiment and used the Shimelle Box of Crayons holographic vellum to back the positive and negative pieces to create two different cards. So easy!
And you don’t have to stop at just personalising the cards, the envelopes also need some jazzing up! Stickers are obviously a very quick and foolproof way of creating a really beautiful envelope, it’s also a great way to stash-bust. But just remember to leave the top right corner sticker-free for your postage stamps!
I predominately used the 30 page Amy Tan sticker book to decorate my envelopes. My favourite is definitely the one with the plane and USA sticker. I used the white pen to create some dotted lines to write the address on and I also used one of the geotag stickers to show where the card is being sent to, for some extra whimsy!
And finally, I experimented with some stamping on an envelope. I used the Amy Tan butterfly stamp from Sunshine & Good Times with the warm toned Vicki Boutin ink pads. I also used the Kelly Creates alpha stamp to spell out ‘deliver to’, to create the look of hand-lettering without the risk of messing it up by writing it myself! My lettering skills aren’t quite there yet ;)
Thanks for joining me today! I hope you have gotten some ideas on how to personalise premade greeting cards!
Elsie x
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