ConGRADuations!

Welcome to The Craft Squad blog hop!  If you hopped in from Stamping Inferno, then you are in the right place!  If you just wound up here on your own, then “Howdy”, and welcome to the Crafty Neighbor blog!  For the next few days, this blog will be participating in The Craft Squad blog hop – a little something we do once every month.  This month, our theme is “ConGRADuation”, and all the participating blogs will be posting projects around that theme, so I hope you’ll follow all the links in the hop until you circle back here!

At first, I was a little worried about coming up with something for this month’s theme.  I hadn’t printed out any graduation photos to use in a layout, and I really didn’t have anyone to give a graduation card to, but after I got the wheels turning, the answer was obvious.  One of the most common types of gifts my son received when he graduated high school was gift cards.  Almost every one of them came in some kind of clever card or holder, but almost all of them were store-bought.  I’ll even be the first to admit that I often just stick the gift card in a regular handmade card or else I buy a cute holder to put it in. 

Gift card holders are challenging, but they don’t have to be.  Once I got started, I came up with all kinds of ideas, and then I couldn’t decide which one, so here are all five!

For today, I’ll focus on three of my favorites.  We’ll come back and look at the other two when the blog hop is over.  This first project was inspired by a gift card holder we made in our 3^rd Wednesday Stamp Club.  I used some scraps leftover from a scrapbook page.  This card is super simple! 

The notch in the pocket was made with a Stampin’ Up Modern Label punch and the “ConGRADulations” was created in Photoshop using the Warp Text feature of the Text Tool.

For the next card, I really wanted to do something with a “chalkboard” feel, so I rounded up every stamp I could think of that could be used on a graduation card.  I had more than I thought I did!  To select the best, I laid the stamps out upside down (print up) , and fitted them together like puzzle pieces.  When I had something I liked, I flipped them over and stamped in black ink first to check my work.  Once I was satisfied with the order, I stamped in white pigment ink on the black paper and embossed it with white embossing powder.  A little pigment ink on a sponge rubbed over the embossed areas helped to create the “erased chalkboard” look.

For this particular card, I chose to make a money or check holder, but you could easily reduce the size of the base to make it work for gift cards, too.  The dimensions for the bill holder are 9.5” x 7.25”.  Score parallel to the short side at the 3.75” and 7.5” marks. 

This last card for today is very unique.  It was inspired by a gift card holder designed by Sharon Armstrong for our 3^rd Wednesday class.  The base of the card is actually made from an envelope.  Cut about 1” off the end of a sealed envelope, then put the cut edge through a decorative border punch.  The insert is the size of a standard A2 card – 4.25” x 5.5”.   To secure the gift card, simply attach it with a pop dot or other adhesive.

That’s it for today!  Please hop on over to Laura's Treasure Chest of Memories blog to see what she has posted for you, and be sure to come back once the hop is over to see the rest of my cards!