The Twinery

Dec 14, 2011

Echo Park and The Twinery Tri-Fold Card Tutorial

I saw one of these tri-fold cards about a week ago online and I instantly loved the look! I really like the 3D feeling look of this type of card. So, I tried one… got it wrong. Then I tried another one… got that one wrong again… 3 expensive pieces of cardstock later, I finally figured it out. So, to save you some time and money I thought that I would make an easy tutorial and a template. Maybe I will save someone out there a few cents and spare them a few pieces of wasted cardstock.

Here is the finished card. I used The Season’s Greetings Collection by Echo Park, a Tim Holtz / Sizzix Snowflake die and twine from The Twinery. The Merry Christmas die cut is by Silhouette America, cut with my Silhouette Cameo (Santa came early this year!).

Here is a simple, self-explanatory template on how to create this type of card. The key is to keep the main three panels the same size. I didn’t realize that when I started out! Also, the folds alternate — towards you (mountain), away from you (valley), repeat, repeat… I hope that makes sense. If not, please let me know.

Click on the image to download the larger printable version.

Linking up to these parties.

Scrapsation, Kate Vickers, Ontario, canada

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Post Categories: Echo Park, handmade card, scrapbooking, scrapsation, Silhouette America, Silhouette Cameo, The Twinery, Tutorial
Post Tags: 3D card, Echo Park, handmade card, kate vickers, scrapsation, Template, The Twinery, tri-fold card, trifold card, tutorial

Dec 11, 2011

Hybrid Ornament and Card with Pink Paislee Snow Day

Have you been following Pink Paislee’s Winter Wonderland Blog event? If you have then you know all about the giveaways, and more importantly, the free digital downloads that they are giving away to EVERYONE and ANYONE! I love incorporating digital elements into my work. I can’t help myself, I’m a Web designer/developer and if I see a way to make a project better with Photoshop, then I do it. That being said, I could never give up my glue and scissors. EVER. I love all the cool techniques that can be done with your hands and a little imagination. There are just some things that a computer could never do.

The other day I was in Chapter’s and I came across this really cool vintage wooden spool with beautiful green velvet ribbon on it. I needed to have it! The ribbon happens to match the Crate Paper Peppermint collection that I’m expecting in the mail any second now and the spool was just itching to become a Christmas tree ornament.

Here’s what the spool looked like before (roughly).

Ribbon Spool

I used Pink Paislee’s digital downloads and resized them in Photoshop to create the spool. Remember, you can size down, but usually not up (depending on circumstances). For example, I can resize a 300 dpi circle image that I got from Pink Paislee here from 2.59 inches to 2.4 inches (the width of my spool), but I couldn’t resize it to anything larger than 2.59 inches without compromising the quality of the printed image. Know what I mean? Print images are always at 300 dpi or better and web images are usually at 72 dpi. How us web geeks came up with the number ’72′, I don’t know. So, an image that’s 2 inches at 300 dpi could be resized to 4 inches at 72 dpi for Web without losing any quality. Clear as mud?

I got the snow man image from the Pink Paislee Blog here. Once I had resized all the elements I needed, I printed them on some nice cardstock and cut them out. Next, I adhered them to the spool and embellished! I added twine from The Twinery as an embellishment, but also as a way to suspend the ornament from the tree. The wood snowflakes are from Maya Road and I added some bling. Everything is better when it sparkles! Here is my finished project.

A close up of the top of the spool ornament. You can get a better look at the bling here. I used a button to hide the knot that’s holding the twine in place. It looks like the twine is seemless up close.