Project: Step-By-Step Halloween Cards 1

This one of the styles of Halloween cards I will be making this year. I don't see many Halloween (and certainly no Samhain) cards for sale in the high-street card shops in the UK. I know it is possible to buy some very lovely cards online, and have custom cards printed, but I quite enjoy paper-crafts of various sorts, so I will be making my own.

Components for card making:
Card blank, sprayed card blank, black paper, "lightning bolts",
marbled paper, drawing of a Devil-skull.

To save a bit of time, I have bought some plain black card blanks and matching envelopes (from The Works for £1.49). I would have had to have bought sheets of black card and black paper anyway and this actually worked out cheaper than buying the card and paper! The first thing I did was mist the cards and envelopes with Magical Shimmer Mist, which is a suspension of shimmery metallic particles in an adhesive spray. It comes in a variety of colours, but for this project I have used silver. You can get similar effects with water-based silver paint and splattering, but it is more time-consuming to achieve. 

Shimmery shimmery shimmery...

As the card blanks were drying, I set about drawing the pictures for the front of the cards. Each person will be receiving a different image on their card. For the purposes of this blog, I have photographed the making of a particular card  with a Devil-skull as the image. I drew it in cheap black biro on ordinary utility white paper - no fancy materials. 

Close-up of fanged skull

I cut the drawing out, then traced around the drawing onto marbled paper (HobbyCraft, less than 50p per sheet) and drew a slightly larger rectangle around that, and cut out the piece of marbled paper. I then took a sheet of black paper and drew around the marbled paper onto it with a white pencil, and then drew a larger rectangle around that. I put the drawing, rectangle of marbled paper, and the rectangle of black paper aside (into my crafting tray). 

Lightning bolts

The next step was to cut out the jagged lightning-bolts. I cut these out of more white utility paper, laying them out on the now-dry card blank to see what size they needed to be, using the two paper rectangles as a guide, and how many I wanted, and also to get a better idea on design. They are quite finicky to cut out, and easy to tear, so once each was cut out, it went straight into the crafting tray for safe keeping.

Layered papers

The last step was gluing it all together in order. I started with gluing on the black rectangle, then arranging all the lightning bolts, then the marbled paper, and finally the drawing.

Finished card

I decorated the envelope in the same way, with the same layers, papers and materials, and with a similar design (with lightning) except with an address label instead of a drawing, but because it is an address label, I am not posting a picture of it up on the internet.