Fifteen Minute Cards

Hello everyone, it is time for our second offering of the month from the Design Team, sharing a few tips and techniques for cards made in fifteen minutes or less. We hope to show you how easy it is to use some of your favourite Chocolate Baroque stamps to make speedy cards that look every bit as good as something that took hours to make. So whether you are a new stamper, or someone who needs a batch card for an occasion like a craft sale or wedding invitation, we hope to give you lots of inspiration in our bi-monthly blog posts.

You can check out our other posts by clicking on the label at the bottom of the post 'Fifteen Minute Cards', and it will bring up the other posts for you. You can also click on all of our names, as you scroll through the posts, and you can get to our blogs for further details on the cards that we have made. We hope that you enjoy our selection this time, grab a cuppa, and enjoy!

For a speedy background, stencils are a great way of creating a pattern, and adding colour. Our first two projects demonstrate this technique. Rachel has used a stencil for her fabulous Halloween card, adding a Halloween image and colouring it with water based markers.

Magda's ATC starts off in the same way, and she has added a pretty flower, some ribbon and gems for texture. Her sentiment makes me smile, as it always reminds me of love letters I wrote to my Hubby as a teenager!

Anne has created two very pretty cards for us this time around stamping onto patterned papers, another great technique for creating a quick card, as your background is already completed.

She stamped the Spinney Design a Tree image and embossed the design using sparkly embossing powder. She completed her design by adding a ribbon, bow and flat-backed pearls. A quick, but beautiful card.

For her second card, she stamped elements from the Seashell Collage and the flying gulls from the Landscape Edges using Coffee Archival Ink onto her background paper (Travels in Italy from Crafty Individuals). The sentiment is from the Steampunk Travel set and was heat embossed with white powder. She added a few details with a fine liner pen and coloured a few areas with a brown pencil. Finally, she added some pink dye around the edges and over the sentiment to make it stand out- the white embossing resists the ink colour.

Gelli print backgrounds are another quick and easy background to use for quick cards. You can have a session making your backgrounds one day, and then on another occasion, spend time creating lots of cards. You do not need to use an entire piece of background either, which makes the backgrounds work very hard for you, as they go a long way.

In the following examples, Dominike has cut smaller pieces of background to stamp her images onto, leaving lots of white space visible on her cards. This creates a very clean and simple looking card. She has used some of our steampunk images and sentiments for her projects.

These would make great cards for the man in your life, as those cards are so difficult sometimes.

I have used some small pieces of fabric, left over from a much bigger project to create my quick cards. I coloured the fabric with water based ink, drying the fabric completely, then stamped the images with Archival Ink. I used iron on interfacing to attach the fabric to some kraft card blanks, and added a button as a simple embellishment. Finally I stamped a greeting directly onto the card blank. More details can be found on my blog.

Brenda always brings us a great range of techniques and ideas, and this time is no exception. For her first card, she stamped the freesias from the June Fairy stamp set twice, and added the quote from the Words of Inspiration stamp set.  She then coloured the flowers with pencils. She stamped and coloured one of the butterflies from the Butterfly Flourish Swirls stamp set, coloured it and attached it to the card.

For her second card, she masked the top and bottom of a piece of card and stamped one of the images from the Pretty Poppies stamp set using Versamark and clear detail embossing powder. With the masking strips still in place, she used Distress Inks to colour over the stamping to achieve a resist finish. The sentiment is a die cut.

This third card was created by repeat stamping leaves from the Autumn Poppy stamp set around the top of the background, and colouring them in with pencils. She added a quote from the Words of Inspiration stamp set, and lightly inked around the border using Distress Ink. She matted and layered the background using toning card.

Her final card this time was created by stamping toadstools from the Autumn Poppy stamp set, the rabbit from Glorious Spring, and willow from Spring Foliage with Black Archival Ink. She masked a sun and using brushes and Distress Ink, she built up background colour. She used a fan brush and watered down Distress Ink to flick some grass along the bottom.

We always like to bear the current season in mind for you as we prepare these blog posts, and have included some quick Christmas cards for you, to help you with those batch cards which you might need to make. Zoe has made this set of four clean and simple cards using one of our Christmas images with an added sentiment. She has used different colour sparkly embossing powders for a bit of shimmer.

Her second project uses one of our very newest stamps, simple, yet effective:

We hope that you have enjoyed the projects that we have shared with you, and that you will try out some of our ideas yourselves. We will be back next month with more time saving tips. Do keep visiting the Design Team Blog for a daily dose of inspiration from our regular posts in the meantime.

Thanks for stopping by,