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Tuesday 31 January 2012

Crafty Types

Still in a mood to combine crafting with typography, following on from my Thank You! and January Blues entries for the Get Funky! challenges, and building on the huge inspiration from Simon Garfield's book Just My Type. As planned when I made the thank you card, I adapted the mini tags design for February birthday cards for my mother and two of my friends.



The colour combinations were inspired by Funky Hand Papercraft Factory CDs again: the spotty designer papers from the Blissful Baby collection on the Colour Me Happy CD and the Come What May collection on the Craft the Year Away CD. I used colouriser software to produce plain papers matching the main colours and found co-ordinating pearlescent card and eyelets from my stash, along with thin black waxed cord.

I had such fun looking through the fonts I had recently collected from Urban Fonts to choose just the right ones for each name. They include Times New Romance, Type Block, a Papa, Algerian, An Akronism and Curlz. I struck really lucky when stumbling across Anonymous Clippings, which was perfect for the sentiment.

Most enjoyable though these cards were to make, they were fiddly and time-consuming, although I was faster when doing two together and having learned from the experience of the thank you card. They are certainly quite busy, especially as they are only A6 in size. I am really pleased with the results, which is almost exactly how I envisaged, although I am struggling with a word or phrase to describe their style. There are elements of shabby chic, with the Kraft card, colours of the Mummy card, eclectic fonts, inked edgings and doodling. But the colours of the Hazel and Karen cards seem rather too lively for this description … and remind me of how an ex-boyfriend described my favoured kind of pop music as jangly. So, in the absence of anything better, I'll settle for jangly shabby chic for now. I think I'll be making more to this design … for people with names of a suitable length.

I also used the Times New Romance font for my brother and sister-in-law's initials on their anniversary card, which might become the basis for several other anniversary cards this year. Again, it uses a Funky Hand designer paper: this time from the Minty Madness collection. The charm embellishment was made from leather cord and beads that were lurking in my stash. I moved away from shabby chic to something rather cooler and more sophisticated (I hope), and used holographic mirror card, which I think works well with the Funky Hand papers. I struggled with how many little heart gems to put in the bottom right hand corner. For an anniversary card, two seemed to be the appropriate number, but I gave in to the pull of the crafters rule of three and think the balance is better for it.

1 comment:

  1. Your cards are just beautiful! I'm so pleased that you have been inspired by Funky Hand papers, it makes my job so much more fun making other crafters happy with their creations.
    Much love
    Anice xx

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