card making craftiness

The month of June is front-loaded with anniversaries, followed quickly by Father's Day. That means a lot of card making!

Here are some of the results:

These two anniversary cards turned out pretty cute!

This poppy-inspired one was fun to make - I first tore red music-printed scrapbook paper into four petals, ripping so that some white showed along the edges. Then, I cut a circle of dark purple-gray metallic paper into a circle, and cut fringe all along the edges. I put it all together with a black brad in the middle. Ta da!

This one is for my good friend, Sarah, and her husband, Stephen. See the little glittery "s" sticker I used for each of the birdie wings? I drew a bird silhouette on the back of a piece of (bunny print!) origami paper, and then cut two at a time (right sides of the paper together to make the birds face each other). I must have been in a fringe-y mood that evening, because I decided that they needed to sit in a bed of green grass.

And now, the Father's Day cards!

These two cards were time intensive! I made two of the tree cards - one for my dad, and one for Hubby's dad. We were planning to see Hubby's grandfather that weekend, too, so he got an extra-special card, as well.

For the tree card, I drew a leaf shape on the back of a piece of card stock, then traced it six times on a scrap of textured green card stock. I saved some time by cutting out of three types of paper at once - that's a lot of leaves!

I then free-handed a tree trunk, fashioned from brown textured card stock. Cut two! The next part - gluing all the little pieces in place - took some time.

The argyle Grandpa card was the most time-intensive card I've ever made, I think! I first had to look up the proportions of a rhombus. Geometry was a long time ago! For those of you who are like me and maybe don't remember, a rhombus, or diamond shape, can be created by four right triangles. I used four 3-4-5 triangles (Pythagorean). Do you remember this formula? a² + b² = c²

It means that you can figure out the length of each side of the triangle, because the smallest side, multiplied by itself; plus the next largest side, multiplied by itself; equals the longest side, multiplied by itself: 3²+4²=5² (ahem, 9+16=25). This is derived from the Pythagorean theorem, fellow math friends.

I kept it simple, and decided to follow the formula rather literally. So, each one of my triangles was 3/4" on one side, 4/4" (1 inch) on the next, and 5/4" (1.25") on the longest side. Bear with me as I sketch a drawing in Paint to explain.

 

There we go. You can see now, I hope, that a rhombus is made up of four right triangles. I showed the dimensions of mine in this picture (3/4", 4/4", and 5/4"). If you do what I did, you'll end up with a diamond shape that's 2" high, 1.5" across, and 1.25" on each diagonal side. Cool, right?

I traced my rhombus template onto four colors of card stock (these colors remind me of golf clothes - buttery yellow-cream chinos, orange polo shirt, brown saddle shoes, and blue caps), and cut away! I like the way the design turned out. To make the gold dots on top of the diamonds, I measured the center of each long side, putting a pencil dot at the 3/4" mark. I then used my trusty ruler to keep the dots 1/4" apart, and dotted away!

Do you like it? Would you try it? In a box, with a fox? (Seuss reference, friends.)