Six Strategies To Creating Handmade Greeting Cards

By Author: Mark Adams
Total Articles: 7
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Using merely a small number of fundamental tools and craft-supplies, along with a few simple tips and techniques, it is possible to make unique handmade greeting cards for several different occasions which includes Christmas, Christening, Mothers Day, Fathers Day, Valentine's, Anniversary, New Baby, Get Well, Bon Voyage, Congratulations, the list is continuous…

You could design a variety of straightforward or complicated greeting cards and you don’t require huge amounts of spare time or money. Usually, the most valuable cards can be produced in under half an hour, using just a small number of essential apparatus.
Once you’ve begun, you could soon be using a variety of techniques to make hand made greeting cards and much more, from wrapping-paper and decorative gift boxes to scrap-book pages and memory albums.

Here are 6 explanations of some of the most popular techniques for making handmade greeting cards

Card-Toppers:
These are previously made decorations, generally with a self-sticking back. They offer an fascinating 3-D effect ...
... and are a good option for beginners. You will not require any glue and a simple handmade card need only be made up of a card-topper, attached to a blank greeting card.

Embellishments:
These are effective for creating a special finish to your handmade greeting cards. Embellishments are basically anything you can stick onto your cards to compliment the design and include card toppers, skeleton leaves, wire, beads, eyelets, brads, pom poms, gem stones, mini flowers, reflective tiles and much more.

Embossing:
Dry embossing - this procedure utilizes either a source of light, such as a light-box, metallic templates and an embosser device or specialised embossing systems to create raised designs and some textures on the card, note card, paper and metallic foil. For an additional effect, the raised exterior may be coloured with a felt-tip or pencil.
Heat Embossing - this procedure utilizes embossing powder, pigment or specialised clear embosser ink as well as a heating device to generate raised designs on card, paper or craft foam. This technique is most often used to compose an additional dimensionality to rubber stamped images.

Glass Painting:
This requires the use of specialised water or solvent-based glass-paints and glass paint outliner or peel-off stickers to construct patterns on glass acetate.

Iris Folding:
This simplistic technique entails folded strips of coloured patterned paper, that are layered, according to a template, into a spiral pattern at the rear of an aperture in blank greeting cards. The name is stemmed from the folded paper designs likening to the iris of a digital-camera.

3D Decoupage:
3D Decoupage is concerned with making 3-D pictures making use of various copies of just one picture. Single elements are cut and stuck into layers to ‘build-out’ the picture, through pads of foam or glue spots, bowed-tip scissors or a craft-knife along with a draper mat.