Exciting news - and a tutorial

I'm delighted to be able to announce today that I have joined the Design Team of the Cards4Guyz challenge blog and this is my first DT post.

If you're not familiar with Cards4Guyz, it is a weekly blog challenge for male themed projects only. I think we're all agreed that making cards for men is much harder than for women, and I've learned  a huge amount about making cards for men in the few months that I've been joining in the challenges so I was delighted when Caz accepted me on to her team.

Here is my first DT card, made for this week's challenge which is No Balls Allowed (Sport). As a fan of motor racing, I immediately thought of Motor Sport and found a great image and backing papers on the La Pashe CD "Something for Everyone". The image, but not the papers, is also available as a decoupage sheet download.

A few days ago I spotted a great tutorial for making a Twisted Card on the Whiff of Joy blog. I immediately thought how useful it would be for man-cards, as I've often found that cards with a bit of engineering in them appeal to men. They spend ages folding and unfolding them to see how they work! So to make this card I followed the detailed instructions which you will find on the link above, but adapted it to a sheet of A4 to give a bigger card. The only drawback with the bigger card was it was difficult to score as it was longer than my ruler or scoring board - but I dug out my old yardstick and used that to score the long diagonal line.

Here is a series of step-by step pictures taken as I went along. A few of tips for you - when you've completed the basic card, make a pencil note on the surfaces you want to cover with paper before unfolding it to do the covering. Draw around the panels onto your background paper, making sure you have arranged it so that the right side of the paper faces the right direction (I got this bit wrong the first time and wasted a sheet of paper because the flags were pointing downwards!). If you are planning on making several cards of this type, you could make a blank card from that old piece of fluorescent pink card in the bottom of your stash pile (I know you have one, we all do) and cut it into separate panels, trimming it down to the size you want to cut your papers to, depending on how much layering you like to do.

 

 

 

 

The topper and greetings need to be added after re-folding the card to get the positioning right. The finished card:

and inside:

 

I added Glossy Accents to the car to make it shiny - that seems to be my new favourite trick!

 

 

 

I think this style of card would be great as a gift card holder, as you could tuck the gift card between the two layers on the inside

 

 

Well, after all that, I had all the decoupage from the image sheet left, as well as some of the backing papers. So what was there to do but make another card?

I'm joining in with

CD Sunday Challenge - Birthday card for a male (with the second card in this post)
Crafting at the Weekend - Anything Goes
Tok Bobok - Masculine
 Crafty Hazelnut's Patterned Paper Challenge - September