TOP 15 Card Making Tips & Hacks You NEED To Try!

Looking to elevate your card making game? Today I'm going to share 15 of my favorite tips and hacks for creating stunning cards with ease. Let's get crafting! Number one, pre-make your card bases and panels. To make an A2 card base I'm going to use my paper trimmer and this is a standard eight and a half by eleven inch piece of heavyweight cardstock that I have sliced down at four and a quarter inches on the short side. Then I'm going to use my scoreboard and on the long side I'm going to score at five and a half inches. Each piece of cardstock will give you two card bases. Now most card makers or paper crafters will have at least a trimmer of some sort in their arsenal. You don't have to necessarily have a scoreboard, although it makes it nice, and you don't necessarily have to have a bone folder. Again, it's a luxury. You can use the handle of a heavy pair of scissors if you don't have that. Making your own card bases is also a very cost-effective craft supply. Here's a breakdown from Amazon for 180 pound pre-made card bases that will cost you $16.95 or 17 cents each. It doesn't sound so bad until you look at Accent Opaque 200 sheets 100 pound cardstock. You will yield 400 card bases for only $14.96. In order to get 400 pre-made bases you'd be spending $67.80 over the $14.96. So you're saving $52.84. That's huge! My second tip is to stamp, color, and cut some of your favorite focal images. Here I'm finishing up a sheet of Pink and Maine's Stinking Sweet Little Skunks, and I just love this stamp set. It's easy to color, easy to cut out, and by having them on hand I can quickly whip up a card in no time at all. I'm lucky enough to have the die cuts for this as well, but this would be a simple one to fussy cut. Once they're all fussy cut, I just put them into sets because I did do multiple sheets of the same stamp set, and then I go ahead and store them in my sentiment book. These are just baseball card holders, and it is super fast for me to just grab the image that I want and go ahead and make that card. Stick with me to the end and then let me know which tip is new to you. Number four is to stretch your stencils. For my first example of how to stretch your stencils, I'm going to use some Distress Oxide in Tumbled Glass over this geometric pattern. Then I'm going to top it with Broken China. However, I'm going to line my stencil back up and then move it slightly offset. In this case I'm going to move it to the right and down, creating a shadow effect in my stencil. I get a whole new look with one stencil. That's a cost-effective savings as well. So here's a second way that you can stretch your stencils. Now this is a Christmas stencil actually, and I'm using Twisted Citron. I want to get a completely different look than I would normally get if I were using this on a Christmas card. Changing the colors and flipping the stencil will do just that. For my second go-around I'm going to be using Rustic Wilderness on top of the Twisted Citron. Now this is going to create depth and dimension and get a whole new look. Now check out the finished look for this one because it's completely different and gorgeous. Number five, using press and seal in your craft room. Not only is press and seal fabulous for your kitchen, it's also fantastic for your craft space. I use it to seal up my jars of texture paste so I keep them fresh and able to be used much longer than if I just used the lid itself. Number six is to use strips in place of foam tape. Here I'm using a happy birthday sentiment that I'm going to build up with two additional pieces of cardstock. This is a great way to stretch your crafty budget because you're not having to buy additional foam tape. Use what you already have sitting in your scrap bundle. Cut off any extra cardstock and it's ready to go. All popped up and no foam tape. Number seven is to line up card easily with a stamp positioner or scoreboard. Here I'm going to use my stamp positioner to line up some strips onto my card base. I've lined my card base into a corner and now I'm just working out where I want the strips. Then I'm going to go ahead and add my liquid adhesive to the back of my first strip. Then I'm going to go ahead and make sure that my card base is securely in the corner of the stamp positioner and line it up against the left side and the top. For the remainder of my strips I'm going to go ahead and use that top edge as a way to line it up. I know that the strips are cut flat so lining it up is easy peasy. As long as your cardstock stays in the corner it makes lining up strips a breeze. Number eight is how to get crisp clean white sentiments on dark colored cardstock. Here I have a piece of black cardstock and I'm using my embossing bag so that I keep any stray white embossing powder from kind of getting all over that black cardstock. That seems to be a number one concern from crafters that I hear about. I'm going to be stamping happy birthday in white onto my black cardstock and my secret weapon is white pigment ink. This one's by Hero Arts. I think it's called unicorn white or white unicorn. I'll find it and link it in the description box below. I also don't press really hard on my sentiments. I'd rather stamp multiple times than press because if you press too hard you end up with blobby sentiments. Because the white pigment ink is opaque it will give my white embossing powder a much better surface to get that crisp white bright look that I'm looking for in a sentiment. My choice is a super fine detailed embossing powder over a regular embossing powder. It's a finer granule so I get better detail. Now this one happens to be by Ranger but I have several others Hero Arts as well. They're all great it just depends on what you got available to you when you go to buy it. Now as you can see I did go ahead and I'm heating it up from the back as well as the front because I don't want bubbles. I did preheat my wow heat embossing tool for about 30 seconds prior to so that I eliminate some of the warping of the cardstock. Number nine is how to get bright bold sentiments on dark cardstock. Begin with a white embossed sentiment. White pigment ink, white embossing powder. Let it cool. That's the key here. Gotta let it cool off. Then choose an alcohol marker in your favorite color. I'm using a Copic here and it's a bright pink and I'm coloring over the white powder. The key here is to totally make sure it is dry and cooled off. If it's still molten when you put your alcohol marker to it you may completely ruin your alcohol marker. I have never been successful in getting this to work with a water-based marker. It's got to be an alcohol-based marker. You will not get the kinds of results that you're going to get if you're trying to use a different color ink with clear embossing powder or sticky ink with a colored embossing powder. You're just not going to get the same results. This is amazing and one of my absolute favorite tricks. My tenth tip is to use printables. Now this happens to be a page from one of my own sentiment collections and one of the things that bugs me to no end is when you download printables that can't be cut on a paper trimmer. So when I created mine I made sure that if you had no other supplies they could be cut out with a paper trimmer or scissors evenly. I've also ensured that there's enough space between your sentiments that if you wanted to use a banner die you could do just that. Now all of my sentiments are available for purchase on my digital storefront which I will leave a link for in the description. I typically print out multiple sheets of sentiments, cut them apart, and leave them in my binder system. It's the same binder that I used earlier for storing my little stinking sweet skunks and that way when I need to make a card quickly I have all of them done by type. So I keep all my birthday ones together, my congratulation ones, thanks, thank yous, you have, you name it. I've got it all in there and it makes card making a breeze. Number 11 is to use your inks for perfectly colored cardstock. Now I wanted perfectly coordinated colored cardstock to go with our flipped stencil panel that we created earlier. So I'm going to use the darker green, the rustic wilderness, and a blending brush to create the cardstock. There's no need to waste ink by coloring the whole thing so I'm just going to do the edges because that panel is going to go right on top of it. Now if you want a simpler way you can certainly go direct to cardstock and just swipe the ink across your card and do it that way. I don't tend to do that because I think it uses a lot more ink. I just use my blending brush and go ahead and just do my edges. Just remember that there's no wrong way in crafting. You do what you are comfortable with and what works for your specific situation. Anything goes when it comes to crafting. I finished up this sweet card with one of my little skunks and a printable sentiment for a quick congratulations card. My 12th hack is to create your own custom stencil butter. Now I love my lunar paste for their shine and I love my texture paste from Ranger and Tim Holtz but sometimes I don't have what I'm looking for so I use golden extra heavy gel gloss as a base for making my own custom stencil butter. Now you've noticed I've got my press and seal on this. This stuff is well over a year old and it's still as fresh as it was the day I opened it. Now I'm scooping some out onto a silicone mat and I'm going to use some distress oxide re-inkers to color it up. Now this could actually be a bonus tip. I totally believe in color swatching. Now I've taken out my distress oxide color swatch list and I'm sorry I didn't bring it all the way up but I'm trying to match that green wreath because I'm going to make a stencil buttered background with that same pine tree stencil that I used earlier and I think I've decided to go ahead and match that up with mowed lawn. Now if you would like to see a much more in-depth tutorial on how to make your own custom stencil butter I'll leave the link right above here. Now oxides need to be shaken up before using them because they do have the pigment that settles down to the bottom and you see that I have my gel gloss on my desk there. I'm going to add a few little squirts of that distress oxide re-inker and then I'm going to mix it up with my palette knife really really well. Now of course I wanted to add a little bling to my gel gloss so I'm using an opal glitter medium and this is like glitter that's suspended in a substance and I'm just using a separate palette knife to go ahead and scoop some of that out and put it onto my craft mat there. You can add glitter straight from a glitter bottle. I've done that too. It works. I just happen to have this and thought well I may as well use it. Now this particular opal glitter medium is from Hobby Lobby. It is no longer available in its current bottle but I did notice the last time I was there that they carry something very very similar just with a new label. I think it's their Master's Touch label so it's the same stuff but I've gone ahead and added that into the gel gloss along with that Mowed Lawn re-inker and I decided to try to keep the stencil from moving around by tucking it into the corner of my silicone mat. It didn't work out as well as I wanted. Now if you're not used to using stencil butter or texture paste this is a really good friendly tip. Don't let this stuff or any texture paste dry onto your products. So get your stencils washed off, get your tools washed off quickly because if this dries onto your tools it's permanent and it is like concrete. It's never going to come off. Very often I keep a little Pyrex dish with soapy water in it right next to me and I just slip my stencils and tools right into that soapy water so that I don't have to rush right away to the sink if I want to complete a project. Number 14, create your own custom colored pearls. This is as easy as using alcohol markers on your embossing powder to create your custom embossed colors because that's what we're doing with these pearls. Any alcohol marker will work so that you can completely customize your project. And finally number 15, no crack embossed vellum. Vellum tends to be pretty delicate especially when we're going to emboss in some of our more highly detailed 3D embossing folders. This one is a Sizzix embossing folder called Arched and I'm going to run it through my Spellbinders Platinum 6 machine and take a look at it. So it doesn't look very good, there's a lot of cracking especially among the edges. Okay let's try it again. Same vellum, this time I am going to back it with a standard piece of 65 pound Recollections white cardstock. Now of course it can be any color, it's just what I happen to have cut, and I'm going to layer them inside my embossing folder, run it through, and let's check it out this time. No cracking, highly detailed, beautiful embossed vellum. Plus a bonus, the white cardstock is also embossed. Thanks for watching, be sure to check out some of my other videos that I've selected just for you. Until next time, I'll see you real soon.