May is National Scrapbooking Month, and Close To My Heart created this Blue Skies product line as a special for the month. I have had a lot of fun playing with the paper, stamp sets, and die cuts, but just the other day I received the BLUE SKIES CARDMAKING KIT in the mail. Ahh, it's so cute! It made eighteen (18!) unique cards, and they are gorgeous!
Here you can see sixteen of them; I saved the last two to assemble in a video, which is posted on my YouTube channel.
The cards themselves were VERY EASY to make; however, I did find the process of creating eighteen individual, unique cards simultaneously a bit overwhelming at first. I quickly figured out a way to make the process go smoothly, so I thought I'd share my tips and tricks with you!
Next, I started assembling the cards...sort of, which will make sense in a second. I still needed to die cut the shapes from the Beautiful Day stamp set and stamp the images onto those cuts, but I didn't want to accidentally mix up my card piles while doing that. I have three young children, and my three year old son likes to "help" me. Can you relate? Ha, ha! I wanted everything adhered together that could be without those die cut shapes, so I started at card #1 and simply moved down the line for all of the cards. If there were any pieces (for example, White Daisy pieces for stamping sentiments) that I wasn't ready to use yet, I just kept them with that card, but at least everything else was glued down!
At this point, I had a pile of cards that were mostly assembled (minus the die cut embellishments and stamped sentiments). I set the pile to the side and turned to the pinwheels and other die cuts.
I needed to make three pinwheels for this card kit. The Pinwheel Thin Cut is so fun and so easy to use! Run the Thin Cut and paper through your die cutting machine, grab a brad, push the brad through each of the holes, and finish by putting the brad through the center hole. To make the pinwheel spin, you'll need to attach it to a circle at the back.
I punched out a one-inch circle and used my Piercing Tool to poke a hole in the center. Then I put my pinwheel's brad through that hole, making a circle backing to my pinwheel. Place some foam tape around the back of the circle (make sure there's room for your brad's prongs to spin around without snagging on any foam tape).
Your pinwheel is ready to go! After making my three pinwheels, I turned my attention to the rest of the die cut shapes. HINT #2: Use my "cheat sheet" to see how many of each shape to cut and what colors to stamp them. I am a very organized person by nature, and I wanted a methodical way to efficiently cut all of these shapes. Check out this Google Doc that tells you how many of each shape to die cut and what colors to stamp them, too!
At this point, I had all the pieces I needed, so I went through my pile of cards and attached the embellishments for each. Since I didn't have the Say It in Style stamp set, I searched through my stamp sets to find sentiments that worked for each card. Everything came together very quickly at this point!
The kit itself is only $16.95, and while you do need a few other items (I highly recommend the Beautiful Day stamp set and Pinwheel Thin Cut), it is a great value for eighteen unique cards! You couldn't buy that many beautiful cards at Hallmark for this price. There was a lot of paper left in my kit, too, so I know that I will continue to use it for other cards or scrapbook layouts. Look at how much was leftover!
The Blue Skies Cardmaking Kit was tons of fun to create, but organization was key! I hope that my tips and tricks help and inspire you to create your cards. If you'd like to purchase any of these items, they are individually linked throughout this blog post, but you can also visit my website at jessicadipzinski.closetomyheart.com. Thank you for creating with me!
