Hello, Aly Dosdall here for Big Picture Classes. I wanted to share a little bit with you about my new workshop, 28 Cards in 4 Weeks. A little background first about why I decided to do this workshop.

I love to give and to receive homemade cards. I think there is something just a little extra special about taking the time and the effort to share a little bit of your creative self with someone else. My problem is that I don’t always remember to make them or have the time to make them when I need them. So I thought, wouldn’t it be great to have the opportunity to make a years worth of cards and have them on hand ready to go whenever you needed them. So each of the cards is going to be pretty simple and easy, but very cute and cleaver designs and should take you no more than 15 minutes or so each day. So real quick I’ll demonstrate for you one of the cards that we’re going to make in less than 4 minutes.

First I’m going to punch some butterflies out of this Jillibean Soup paper. I’m just using some scraps that I had. I love to use scraps for card making. Actually these particular scraps come from the 6” x 6” paper pads that they make which is great for card making because they scale the patterns down so that they are small enough to fit on a card and you can still see the whole pattern and it doesn’t get lost. So these are 6” x 6” paper pad scraps, how’s that. I’m just going to do one punch from each of these scraps and then I’m going to adhere them to the base in kind of a grid pattern and we’re going to put them kind of in the top half or two-thirds of the card because we’re going to have a sentiment down here. So once you get them where you want them then you’re just going to adhere them onto the card. Now, I’m not too picky about measuring anything or making sure everything is perfectly aligned because I think machines are good at that but humans aren’t, so you want your card to look like you made it, not that it came from a store. So if there is a little bit of imperfection and asymmetry, that’s perfectly fine.

So we’re going to stick those there. Next I’m going to take a little black button and some of this Jillybean Soup baker’s twine and thread it up through the holes. Sometimes I have to moisten the ends, kind of like you do when you are threading your needle just to make sure, sorry, just to make sure everything gets up in there nice and smooth. What we are going to do is tie a double knot, I can scoot this over a little bit. A double knot is right over left, left over right, or vise versa I suppose. So once I’ve got that knot tied, I’m going to take my scissors and just trim ends off. Then we’re going to get a glue dot for the button. I love those for buttons. Stick it to the back of the button and that button with the twine is going to go right on this butterfly right here in the center. Now we’re going to put our sentiment on the card and what I’ve done is I’ve used these stickers from SRM Press and they are great because they are clear, so they take on the color of whatever paper you stick them onto. So I am going to stick this down here right about the same margin as the butterflies are. There is a little tiny bit hanging off on my edges so I’m just going to trim a little bit there and a little bit there, and there you go.

I hope you enjoyed that little demonstration and that gives you a feel for what this workshop is going to be like. I hope you will join me and I can’t wait to see you in the classroom.