Make A Card- Halloween Edition

Finished card- pumpkin patch

     Now, obviously, I am a bit early for Halloween, but when you send people things in the mail, you have to be ready earlier than the actual holiday. And when you make them yourself, it is even earlier, so I am actually on schedule this year to send them to people during the correct holiday (versus normal when I send Christmas cards as New Year's cards- whoops.)
     Cards still take me a long time to make, mostly because I am a perfectionist and I like to do as many of the pieces as I can by hand. However, I have shortened my hour per card standard a bit by using repetitive shapes and rifts off the same card style.


Materials:

Materials: paper, scissors, and paper cutters

• Double sided sticky-tape (this is my best friend when making cards)
• Scissors
• Paper cutter or slicer
• label maker with label tape, stickers, or pieces of paper with letters on them (yeah, definitely thought I was buying stickers when I first got them....)

 Paper

•  2 shades/patterns of brown
•  3 shades/patterns of orange
•  a strip of a coordinating color
• a blank card, white

How To:

1.     Cut out the shapes needed to make the pumpkins. Below, I have created a visual tutorial of how to do this. Get a square or a rectangle piece of orange paper. Cut two slits; on opposite corners in the middle of the square. Now, you will connect these lines with half circles to make a pumpkin shape. The shapes don't have to be perfect, just make sure that all your edges are rounded where the slit meets.

2.     Get all of your shapes ready. They include 3 pumpkin shapes, 3 brown rectangles (they will be the stems of the pumpkins), letters H-A-P-P-Y H-A-L-L-O-W-E-E-N, and a long skinny rectangle (long enough to go to the edges of the card- lengthwise)

All the shapes: pumpkins (in shiny orange, regular orange, and chevron striped orange), brown little rectangles, etc.

3.     Assemble the pumpkins: use a piece of sticky to attach the stem to the back of the pumpkin shape. Now put more sticky tape on the back of the pumpkins.

Tape holding the stems in place and extra tape for the back of the pumpkins

4.      Run the long rectangle strip along the top of the card using more sticky tape (I cut my sticky tape in half, lengthwise). Then add the pumpkins, one on either side at the bottom and the last in the middle of the first two. So it looks like this... (look below)...

Pumpkins and skinny rectangle, attached with sticky tape

5.     Lastly, place the letters "Happy Halloween"on the card. Tada! You are done and have a classy Halloween card to send to your family and friends.

 6. If you want to add a layer to make the background more interesting, putting a nice transparency behind the pumpkins is a nice touch (especially if it matches the tone of the card).