General Greeting Cards (It's Finally Over!)

This series of posts features cards I've made for a specific stationery order. My customer requested 25 greeting cards for a variety of occasions. And that's all the direction I got! Knowing her previous purchases from me, she likes simple things and lives on a farm, so I kept that in mind when I was making these cards. She's seen most of the designs I keep on hand for craft shows, so I wanted to create totally new cards for her.

I've tried to divide the cards out into small bunches (rather than overwhelm you with 25 cards and deets in one post) by the occasions they were designed for. Also, I'm a terrible photographer when it comes to cards. This has been confirmed.


Enjoy!

Good morning, all! Well, it's finally here...the end of this series of cards! I want to thank everyone again for all the support I've been given through this series. It's awesome to know that I have people in my corner when it come to this stationery thing :) Now that this series is done, I'm hoping I've found both my blog and creating motivation to keep posting projects on a regular basis. We shall see! I do have a lot of projects in the works for both personal things and for customers, including some wedding invitations, an aisle runner, birthday party invitations, and a scrapbook I will be donating to a fundraising event. I promise to take lots of pictures and share them here!

On to the cards...

This first card I left without a sentiment just because I think the image needs to be the focal point. This card could be used for so many sentiments, I really couldn't narrow it down if I wanted to. My favorite parts are the textured cream cardstock (I rarely use textured cardstock) and the pearl at the center of the flower).

Next up is a card with a color scheme that's really out of my comfort zone, but I wanted to try something different. I love that purple satin ribbon...it's heavy and sturdy. I've been hoarding it for years, and I'm forcing myself to use it occasionally on special projects. The little tag/sentiment image always makes me smile. The first card I ever made Mike (our first Valentine's Day, after we'd only been dating a couple of weeks) had that image repeating as a background. He still has the card sitting in his office. So sweet :)

This card was one of the most time-intensive cards I've made in a long time. Each piece of the background paper is a 1"x1" square, pieced together to look like a quilt. Now...I don't sew, but I still wanted this to have a quilted look, so I drew in my "stitching" around the border. Then I used markers on water-color paper to color in the farm scene. I did the same paper piercing and drawn stitching technique around the focal image. It's definitely a fall-ish card, but since my customer lives on a farm, I couldn't pass up a chance to use this image on a card for her.

And here's another farm image I couldn't pass up! You can pretty much bet that if I find a cute (realistic looking) farm stamp set, I'll be buying it. There aren't too many out there. I used a wheat stamp at the bottom to make a border and add some texture to the base of the card. I also distressed all the layers to give the card a more natural look. This set of 25 cards is definitely the most often I've pulled out my distressing tools!

Well, there ya have it! Thank you again for looking at all the cards I've been creating over the last few weeks. I'm really happy to report that my customer was thrilled with all the cards I gave her, which I was a little nervous about (I like direction when I'm creating custom orders...to have someone say, "Make what you'd like" is a dream, but when it came time to turn them over to her, I had butterflies in my stomach).

Have a great Tuesday, everyone!