Rule of Thirds Greeting Card

Greetings and good rainy day! It's a good day - we're almost through the awkward gap between my birthday and D's when I'm two years older than him. He's agreed that, starting this year (since I've hit 3-0), he's just going to pretend that he's my age. So, happy 30th birthday!
I wanted to mention to my "followers" with limited blog experience that you can leave comments in the guest book at the bottom, even if you can't comment at the end of a specific post. The comment part is easier if you have a g-mail account. No pressure. I won't call you out on it.


Okay, here's the project of the day: greeting cards. First, the envelopes. I have a template for an envelope from Fiskars that I bought at an SSD garage sale, but you don't need one of those to make your own cards. Just carefully unfold an existing envelope that you like the size of, and use it as a pattern. Trace around it (I like using double-sided paper, so it looks special from the outside and the inside), cut it out, and fold in the flaps and glue. That's it. Super-easy. To make a card to go in it, measure and be sure the folded card is 1/4 inch smaller on all sides than the folded envelope. (My cards need to be 4 1/2 by 5 1/2 inches to fit the envelopes, so I cut them out as 9 by 5 1/2 inch rectangles.)

Easy Rule of Thirds Card Design
For this card, I used the rule of thirds to guide the design on the front. (Rule of Thirds: imagine a tic-tac-toe board over a square space and arrange elements at the intersection of the lines, not in the middle square.) Since my card is a rectangle, I imagined six squares instead of nine. I found six coordinating paper scraps to be the squares and cut them out, then rounded to corners for a more finished look. (I got double-duty from a few of the papers that are reversible - I used both sides.) I put the message, "thank you," on the bottom corner square, then treated each block as an individual picture and just cluttered it up with embellishments I had on hand. Greeting cards are great for scrapbookers - we always end up with scrap paper and extra little embellishments, and making cards gives us more justification for our obsessive collection of supplies. ("But D," I say, "it's for scrapbook pages and cards!" You can see what a convincing argument it is.) I also like to use found items on cards - I don't worry about archival-safe when I'm doing cards, so I use tags that come on clothes, I cannibalize other greeting cards, I cut out pictures from magazines. . . For this card, the top middle square is a price tag that came on a jar of buttons - I just used the back of it.

On Paper Selection
For each card, you'll need one double-sided piece of cardstock for the envelope and one coordinating piece of paper for the card. Be sure that one side of the envelope paper is light enough that you can write an address on it - the inside can be as busy as you want it to be. For the card paper, make sure you can write legibly on the side that will be the inside of the card. If you're in love with paper that won't let you do that, an option is to cut out a rectangle of plain coordinating paper and glue it to the inside of the card for your message. If you're using 12x12 inch paper, you'll need a whole sheet for one envelope, and you can get two cards out of a single page. I usually buy two pages of the envelope paper and one page of the card paper, so out of three sheets I can get two card-and-envelope sets.

Happy scrapping! Oh, and I finally got some new slipcovers up on my Etsy site! I was inspired by Anthropologie and decided to use non-literal names for all the different designs. D totally didn't get it, but I'm going for evoking emotion, here!