A Happy Handmade Mother’s Day : Watch Me Make a Card!
Look Ma! I did it myself!
I have always loved one-of-a-kind, handmade items! It’s probably why I was a fine arts major in college. But, I’m slowly learning the beauty of being able to duplicate something handmade with little hassle!
A little while ago, I mentioned that I had jumped down the Cricut rabbit hole. I have yet to find my way out. This time, it’s making insert cards with the help of the Cricut Joy, Procreate on the iPad and my humble, little sketchbook.
Cricut sells these little Insert Card packs to make the cardmaking process easier. They come with the envelopes, pre-scored cards and coordinated inserts so your card is halfway ready before you even make the first cut.
For this first Mother’s Day, I was also going to start with a pre-designed template. But, after browsing Cricut Design Space, although the designs were really cute and there are tons of them, I felt like I just wanted to try it myself for the experience. I live on the wild side!
As always, I start anything with a little sketch in my trusty, dusty sketchbook. That helps me visualize what I’m doing before I go to Procreate or Cricut Design Space (or some other program). I learned two things:
You need to make some breaks in the line of your drawing from time to time in certain designs. I saw this in a lot of the designs on Cricut Design Space and it makes sense because this project involves primarily cutting and drawing. So, for instance, if your design has an O, an O has negative space enclosed within the stroke that makes up the ‘o’ (in typography, it’s called a counter). Unless I want the hole to fall completely out when it’s cut (which in some projects could potentially be a design feature, but is not in this case), I have to compensate by breaking the line around it while keeping it readable. There are a few others letters like that (A, P, R, etc.). There’s likely instances where that would come into play for small drawings or embellishments too.
You need to plan to use the dimensions of the card for your canvas and figure out where to place the slots for the insert to fit into the card. The pack tells you the size of the cards, so that’s easy peasy. But, my design initially started squarish, so I had to adjust that after I got to Procreate. The slots also were done easily enough when I transferred the drawing to the iPad using a blocky brush and a small margin.
To be on the safe side, test the Draw function for your lettering on some scrap paper first. You may need to adjust the spacing in your lettering for the Pen in the Draw function due to the size of the pen you’re using. My pen was thicker in diameter than the pencil I used to draw the sketch. I didn’t notice until after the Cricut completed the project that I would have liked to have adjusted that a little more.
The Insert Cards I had were 4.5” x 6.25” and I used a 1/4” margin in Procreate. for my slots Then, I exported them as PNGs and uploaded them to cut in Cricut Design Space. I put them both on the same canvas and selected the portion I wanted to be drawn, changing the Linetype for it to Draw. Then, I hit “Make” and followed the prompts on the screen.
You can see my process transferring the sketch to my iPad and then onto the machine below.
The mat you see being used in the video is the Card Mat that was made to be used with the Cricut Joy. I found that it leaves very obvious impressions of the design that were alarming at first. But I have since read it’s normal. My Cricut Cuttlebug plates had similar impressions in it after use and they are still going strong. I suppose this may be similar.
But look at these beauties!!
Pretty cute, right?! They’re the best of both worlds…handmade and repeatable. That means BOTH of my moms are going to love these!
Have you tried making your own insert card yet?
