Thanksgiving Card with Outline Stickers

Fall is here and I REALLY have to get moving on creating my Thanksgiving cards for this year - so here's one.  It's a little hard to tell from the picture, but the strip at the top is brown like below - with gold ribbon (I've got to get a better light set-up for taking pictures!).

This was a pretty quick card to put together because the focal and greeting are outline stickers.  I'm not sure who manufactures them, but I got them from Pop-Ups Etc.  The gold border around the brown rectangle is made with Peel-Off stickers.  The focal is framed with die cuts from a Nelly Snellen Die set, and the frame for the greeting is cut from the Respendent Rectangles set from Spellbinders.  The patterned paper doesn't show up as well as I would like.  It's shades of orange with small falling leaves here and there.

Marvelous Squares Dies from Spellbinders

Today's card was inspired by one made by Becca at Amazing Paper Grace, and uses my new Spellbinders Marvelous Squares dies.

The basic card is a 6" gate-fold made with two 9" x 6" pieces of cardstock in contrasting colors.  Each are scored and folded at 3" to form a 6" square piece with a 3" flap.  The two square parts are glued one on top of the other so the flaps form a gate-fold.

The rest of the card front consists of a larger frame, and inner focal piece.  Both are made with the Marvelous Square die set.  For ease of description, I'll number them from LARGEST to smallest.  Thus, die number 6 is the smallest die in the set, while die number 1 is the biggest one.

Make the larger frame:

• Cut 3 squares from cardstock (smallest can be paper if you wish): one that is 5 1/4" square (teal here), one that is 5" square (tan here), and one that is 4 1/4" square (striped).
• Cut each of these squares in your die cutting machine, using the largest die centered in your square.  Run through again with an embossing mat to emboss them if you wish. 
• Set aside the inner cutouts and glue the outer frames together - layered largest to smallest with the smallest on top.
• Set frame aside.

 Make the focal:

• Choose two of the cutouts from the previous step (I used the striped and the tan).
• Cut each of them them with two dies at the same time (die number 2 and die number 4). You will want to tape the dies to your cardstock with removable tape (try stencil tape or painters tape).  HINT:  These two pieces must match when you are done, so I recommend cutting one and then using it as a "template" for the second.  To do this, place your dies on the second piece of cardstock, then place your first cutout on top, adjusting the dies until they line up just right. TAPE IN PLACE!  You will probably also want to run them through a second time to emboss them before removing the dies. Make sure you save the "innies".  You'll need some of these leftover pieces later!
• Before gluing these two pieces together, take the one that will form the outer frame of your focal and snip out the center part with a pair of small scissors (striped one in this example).  Now when you glue them together, the back piece (tan) shows in the center, and the front piece (striped) is what you see around the edge.  
• Stamp your sentiment in the center of your focal.  Set aside.

Assemble your card:

• Take your larger frame and center it on the front of your card.
• Glue it to the LEFT FLAP ONLY. (picture below shows what the left side looks like with the left flap open)

• Now, center the focal on the closed card and glue it to the RIGHT FLAP ONLY (see picture below)

These two pieces will interlace as you open and close your card:

Now for the fun part - decorating!  I took some of the "innies" from the previous step and ran them through my Xyron Sticker maker.  I then used the striped pieces to decorate the frame and the tan pieces to decorate the focal frame as shown.  Crystal flowers from my stash, and a bit of ribbon completed the front of my card.  Here's a picture of the card when it is closed so you can see the detail a little better:

You can probably tell what I did for the inside of the card just by looking at the next picture.  The teal frame was cut with die number 1 from a 5" square piece of cardstock.  The tan was also cut from die number 1, but this time I used the inner part.  I embossed both pieces, and glued them as you see here.

After I had my card finished, I realized I didn't have an envelope that was big enough for it!  This is one of those times that the Enveloper on my Ultimate Crafter's Companion comes in so handy.  I have a chart of what I need to do to make envelopes in all sorts of sizes (get yours here), so it's pretty easy.  EXCEPT I didn't want to use up my scrapbook paper to make an envelope and I needed a piece that was 9 1/2 x 9 1/2 to make my envelope.  Easy enough.  I grabbed a sheet out of a wallpaper sample book!!!!  Here's my finished envelope.

More Techniques for Newspaper Clippings

Yesterday's post shows some scrapbook pages where the main focus is a newspaper clipping or two.  Today's pages also have newspaper clippings, but they are not particularly focal points.  

On the first page (above), the newspaper clipping is a nice addition, but it takes a back seat to the photo and my own journaling and title.  This was achieved mostly through the use of color.  The white really pulls the eye, so the tan of the clipping fades to the background.  You'll notice I used tan decorative elements, however, to help pull the page together.

This blue page, isn't my favorite.  If I were doing it now, I think I would have tripple-matted the focal photo by adding a second mat in white and then a third mat in tan.  This would have helped draw the eye and make the focal photo appear larger.  As things stand, there's a bit of a fight for focal point, despite the addition of the decorative corners & flower.  The addition of the additional mats would also have helped pull the page together.  If that had been done, and the newspaper clipping moved down a bit, I think this would have been a great page. I like the way the title was done in colors similar to the newspaper clipping.

This third page is a bit busy, but it contains some wonderful items about my grandmother's engagement party.  Here you see some newspaper articles, along with a couple of momentos from the party.  The napkin has been discolored because of adhesive someone used on it in the past.  As usual, I chose to mount it with no adhesive actually touching it, so I won't be making the situation any worse.  My grandmother had written a bit about the party on the napkin.  It's fun to have her handwriting on the page.

This final page also has a newspaper clipping, but once again, it is not center stage. On the actual page, the colors of the clipping and the tans used in embellishing, blend better than it looks like here.

I hope these pages have given you some ideas for incorporating newspaper clippings into your scrapbooking.

Scrapping with Newspaper Clippings

Recently someone asked about scrapping with newspaper clippings, so I decided to go back through some of my heritage albums and look for examples.  First a quick note about my scrapping philosophy when it comes to Heritage Albums.  I choose to avoid using adhesive directly on any of my heirloom photos or documents.  This has required creativity on my part, but even with "acid free" adhesives, I feel my heirloom items are safer this way.  I routinely use clear photo corners - sometimes mounted with them showing, sometimes mounted to the reverse of a frame to hold an element in a way that will be invisible behind the frame.  I also recommend spraying your clippings with archival spray to help protect them.

These first two pages make use of punched borders and punched/cut elements (stars, ghost, arrows, titles).  The ghost and titles were cut with my Silhouette.  I hand-cut the arrows.  As you can see, I cut the arrows long enough so I could anchor them to the paper beyond the clipping (no adhesive touching the clipping itself).  The arrows point to the names of people of interest in the articles. As you can see, the paper I used for the second page was sort of "color blocked" in the way it was designed, and I made use of that in my layout.

This next example is a page that is pretty much all newspaper clipping!  As you can see, I printed my title on a coordinating strip of paper (actually printed the title, then cut it into a strip!) and punched a couple of shapes out of it (letting the background show through).  These shapes, along with a couple of others, form a bit of a border at the top of the page.

Today's examples show pages where there isn't much besides the newspaper clippings.  My next post will show some pages that combine photos with newspaper clippings.  

There are also a few other posts on this blog that use newspaper clippings or old documents, check out the following links:

Newspaper clippings: 

• Here's a layout that has the newspaper article from when my grandmother was hit by a car as a child. I used the actual newspaper clipping here - spraying it with archival spray and attaching it with clear photo corners so it wouldn't be ruined by the addition of adhesive. 
• Here's a scrapbook page with a newspaper clipping that had a photo (though it's a copy of the clipping and much more recent).

Other old documents:

• Here are some other posts with fragile documents. "In her own words" and "Family Bible" put them into vellum pockets. "Make Your Own Faux Ribbon" shows an example with an old graduation leaflet (my grandfather's - scroll down to the bottom of the post).