Getting Crafty

As promised late last week, I spent some of the weekend making Christmas cards.

I love simple cards but my poor, neglected sewing machine was calling to me this weekend: “Try out my zigzag feature on some of your plainer cards and see if you don’t love using me!” it said. “Even with the zigzag or just a simple straight stitch, your cards will still have that simple feel that you like!” it said, repeatedly, so I gave in. After a quick practice on some scrap paper to make sure I still knew how to use a sewing machine (it had been sitting unused for literally years!), it was show time. First up was this card:

Very simple, all I did was affix a strip of festive paper with two rows of zigzag stitching! Very quick!

One of my pet peeves when using brads, is what to do to cover up the underside of the sheet that you have poked holes into. One suggestion is to never put brads directly on your cardstock, but rather on a sheet of paper that you later attach to the cardstock (thanks, Kari!) but I find that even when I do this, the bump on the other side of the paper makes it hard to glue securely (and flat) to the cardstock. It gets messy and wrinkled and it looks unprofessional. Not sure what I’m talking about? Here’s a picture of that I mean:

Yuck, right? Well, what I discovered is if I put the brads on the sheet of paper then sew it onto the cardstock, it looks much better, and I don’t have to worry about gluing a strip of paper to the inside of the card to hide the back of the brads! You might think I’d care about covering the stitching marks on the other side but for whatever reason, that doesn’t bother me as much….although, if I do decide it bothers me, the stitching is flat so it would be a breeze to cover up!

Want to see more cards? Have a gander:

All the remaining cards used one of two types of cardstock with the same sheet of 12 x 12 printed paper and brads, meaning they all look pretty much the same, but there were some different arrangements (give me some credit, darn it!). I must say it’s been quite addictive using the sewing machine; now I just need to learn how to sew curves: my attempt to sew a heart cut out of patterned paper onto a sheet of cardboard was disastrous:

(It looks much worse in person, like I was going it with my eyes closed or something. how do you get your needle to follow the curve of the “material” (paper in this case)?