Bella Blvd Studio Blog: Birthday Cards Five Ways With Laura

"Happy Birthday" card set, by Laura Vegas.

Hey everyone, it's Laura here with you today to talk birthday cards. I don't know about you, but the cards that I need the most seem to be the cards that I never have on hand when I need them. At the top of that list is birthday cards. Once we hit May and June in this family, there are birthdays left and right, and I knew that I needed to replenish my stash if I was going to be prepared. When it comes to making birthday cards, I love coming up with a design that I can use for multiple cards - cards that I can mass produce and create assembly line style. I also love to keep these cards simple, and flat for the most part, since that makes them super easy to mail.

The first step was picking out my patterned papers for each card. I knew that I wanted a set of cards geared towards men, a set geared towards women, a set geared towards younger boys, a set geared towards younger girls, and a set geared towards teenage girls (being that I have two teenage girls myself, who both have lots of friends). I dug through all of my Bella collections, picking out a few patterned papers for each set of cards.

I love incorporating my Silhouette into the design when mass producing cards. If I am making a single card, or even two to three cards, I don't mind using alpha stickers or chipboard letters. But when it comes to making a large amount of cards at once, using a die cut sentiment, paired with patterned paper or cardstock, is much more cost effective then using alpha stickers or chipboard, where your letters are more limited.

I die cut the word "birthday", along with a scalloped border (sized for the width of my card), from patterned paper, and the word "happy" from cardstock. I cut enough pieces to make 20 cards, using essentially 4 sheets of paper.

I cut all of the additional pieces of patterned paper needed for each card at one time. I like to think of this as assembly line card making. Doing all of one step first (for all cards), then all of the second step next, etc. I always use textured white cardstock for my card bases, and will often leave the top part of the card as is, adding the patterned paper to the bottom part of the card. But this time around, I decided to use a lined patterned paper and a grid patterned paper for the top parts of each card.

I started assembling the cards by adhering all of the pre-cut pieces of patterned paper to the card bases. Once I had the three pieces of paper adhered (as shown above), I zig zag stitched down the thin strip of patterned paper with my sewing machine. From there, I adhered my scalloped borders and sentiments.

Because I did these cards in steps - cutting all of the patterned paper pieces at once, die cutting my sentiments and borders at once, doing all of the machine stitching at once, etc - I put 20 cards together in no time at all. I hope you'll try this out the next time you find yourself running low on a card that you know you will need many, many more of.