Paper Cut Birthday Card

For a recent friend's birthday I decided to make her a special card.

I wanted to do a paper cut card so that I could use my new craft knife which has a rotating blade, specifically for cutting around curves.

I drew out my image on blue card and then got to cutting. I had to make sure each element of the picture was connected so that it didn't fall out when cut around.

When all the cutting out was done I decided to put white paper behind the blue card to make the image stand out.

This is where I had a bit of a fail. I decided to use spray glue to stick the paper and the card, so I sprayed the back of the blue card. Unfortunately blobs of glue got through to the front of the card, there were stringy bits between shapes and the glue stained through to the front in places. 

Don't by cheap spray glue people! Get the proper spray mount stuff!

I stuck the card to paper anyway and tried to pick off the blobs of glue but it still looked messy. So I decided to paint over the blue card completely with blue paint. In hindsight this would have been better done before I stuck on the white paper because I kept getting bits of paint on the white paper which was very frustrating.

But the level of messy this created wasn't as bad as the hot mess it was before so it was an improvement.

And my friend loved the card!

Wedding Gift Card

My friend Lizzi recently asked if I would do a favour for her. She wanted me to paint on a Starbucks gift card to make it wedding themed, for a friend who's getting married soon.

I wasn't sure if painting it would affect the card and whether it would be accepted, but Lizzi, who has worked for Starbucks for like 6 years, assured it'd be all good.

I still didn't want to paint on it though because I didn't know how well it would hold up to being stuffed in a purse. So I decided to go with a sticker.

I designed this little image of a couple with flowers around them which would cover just the cups on the original card, so you could still see the Starbucks bits. I was going to print it out on a sticker sheet and colour it in with water colour paints or maybe colour pencils. But when I came back to it the next day I decided I didn't like it any more.

So I googled around for inspiration and came up with this burlap/lace design for the card. And since I couldn't decide on an image to put on it, I thought about a phrase. Lizzi and I came up with 'to have and to hold, until your Starbucks gets cold'.

I put the whole thing together on Photoshop and printed it on to a sticker sheet. I cut that out and very carefully stuck it to the front of the card, and then trimmed around the curved corners.

To finish it off  I stuck three little gems at the top for a bit of bling.

What do you think?

Any other personalised wedding gift ideas?