This year the Macmillan Coffee Mornings are a little different with the current social distancing and as fund raising is the purpose I decided that some themed cards might be appropriate.

A friend is organising an outside event locally and was reaching out via Facebook for baked goods, while I do like to bake, my creations are not always what I would class as of a saleable standard, so I thought I would use my love for cardmaking to help support the charity instead.

I wanted to show you my creative process in the hope that you might be able to use some of my ideas to help when you get stuck in that creative rut. I have been focussing my live videos and tutorials recently on using a more basic approach, after all we don’t want to spend all our time thinking about what to put on our creations, let’s use the time to make more cards and in turn send more cards.

I started by popping onto Pinterest – WARNING!!!!! please do set yourself a time limit here as it’s a time vacuum, all be it a beautiful time vacuum! I tend to set a 10 minute timer on my phone – yes! I know, but I am a sucker for looking at pretty projects!!

I use the search engine and type in Card Sketches, there are loads to choose from, however as this is a charitable endeavour I’m looking for a fairly simple layout that I can duplicate quickly but will still look handmade and not shop bought. I will then draw a few of the sketches with a few labels so that I remember how they went together. These sketches are pretty basic and can be adjusted for the tools and resources I have.

As this endeavour is a Coffee/Tea and Cake sale then I’m theming my cards to try to fit in with this. So I am using some retired products including stamps, dies and designer paper. I figure this is a good way of using up old supplies and supporting a charity at the same time.

I’ve used the Stampin’ Blends to colour my images and add a few shadows to make these cakes look really cute.

One of the other stamp sets I’m planning to use is Press On from our current August to December Mini Catalogue. This set is great fun and also is fabulous for coloring with the Blends.

Thanks for joining me here. I do hope that you have enjoyed this insight into how I put together cards without too much procrastination, watch out for Pinterest though…………. Remember I did warn you!

Finished Cards

Bel x