How To Be More Creative With Your Cardmaking

Are you looking for ways to be more creative? To stretch your cardmaking skills? Try getting out of your crafty comfort zone by using a product that isn’t your typical style.

Today Carolyn is getting out of her comfort zone with Doodlebug…

Doodlebug’s bright, saturated colours are not my natural ‘go-to’ and I tend to gravitate to more romantic/vintage, or modern and graphic designs, yet I also recognize that reaching outside our comfort zones is where growth happens.

In my erroneous assessment that Doodlebug was too cute and bright for me, I’ve been missing out! The patterned papers are darling, and I LOVE the font styles that they use for many of their greeting stamps. Delighted I set about making my cards. The goals I had were to:

1) Make a gift card, where the Rainbow Doodlebug Collector Pink could be showcased, with the idea being that the recipient would remove the pin and it would be a keepsake long after the card was discarded.

2) Make a card featuring the Rainbows & Unicorn Stamp set. Often I like to use the coordinating die, but I worked flat for this card and challenged myself to use my markers, glitter and embellishments to add dimension.

For the gift card, I decided to keep it simple and straight forward. My thought process was that it would be a card that the recipient would throw out after they removed the pin, so I wanted to make it stylish, but not invest too much time on something that would be discarded. So I added a grounding element, then used blender brushes to make a sky, leaving the pin and sentiment to be the star of the card front.

For the “A Friend Like You” card, I did a fair bit of masking so that the stamped elements on the front of the card would overlap. To do so, for each stamped image that overlapped, I would stamp it first on a piece of post-it note paper, being sure that part of the image was on the portion of the post-it paper that had the adhesive backing. Then, I used my scissors to cut the image out, cutting on the outside of the edge of the stamped image. I could then use that post-it as my mask and layer it on top of the background layer, when I stamped the subsequent image on top of it. 

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