A Year to Remember Cards & Envelope Tutorial

I am a frugal crafter… to the extreme. I don’t like throwing out scraps of cardstock or designer paper and nothing makes me happier than maximizing the supplies I have. Today I want to share some tips with you on how I use up some of my scraps from mini albums and scrapbook layouts to create really fun cards!

First, let’s chat about the card base. I always cut my card bases to measure 4″ wide by 5-1/2″ tall, when folded. This size is a touch more narrow than a standard card would typically be (4-1/4″ X5-1/2″) but this way I can get three card bases out of one piece of 12″ X 12″ cardstock instead of two!

When creating cards I love to go through my pile of “leftovers” – I keep each product line together so that I’ve got the papers, stickers and embellishments all in once place. I spread everything out to see what it is that I have to work with when making my cards and I create little piles of things that might go well together.

For example, with my first card I had an embellishment that read ‘birthday’, from the A Year to Remember Part 2 Embellishments, so I went through the remaining stickers I had to find one that would work as an accent on my card. Add to that a few scrap pieces of paper from the A Year to Remember Paper Pack, and voila!

An absolute must for helping the greetings on these cards come together are the Mint ABC/123 Stickers. You can take random words from your embellishment or stickers and string them together to make something meaningful, unique, or just silly and fun!

One of my favourite things to do is to reinvent or manipulate a sticker or embellishment to look entirely different than it was designed. For example, on the card above the word ‘fabulous’ is actually a sticker that was designed to be used on a layout featuring a calendar. You can see below that it has an arrow tip – which is perfect for a calendar layout, but I thought it would look better on the card with a flagged tip. All I had to do was cut out the sticker (keeping it on its backing) and use the Chevron Border Maker Cartridge to snip a flagged tip!

On my last card I wanted to create another flagged tip but my strip of cardstock was slightly too wide to punch the same way I did for the ‘fabulous’ sticker. This time I just slid the end of the strip of cardstock into the side of the punch as shown below, perfect flagged tips, every time!

Here is how the final card turned out:

My narrow cards still fit beautifully into A2 standard size envelopes, but I love to create my own coordinating envelopes. It takes less than half a sheet of 12″ X 12″ designer paper to create an envelope that perfectly coordinates with your handmade cards, how could you not!? If you’d like step-by-step instructions on how to make some too, check out this FREE Envelope Tutorial!

And there you have it – three fun cards made using the absolutely fantastic A Year to Remember Paper pack, embellishments and stickers!