REVIEW: making masculine cards with Hunkydory

You can't have failed to notice how often, over the years, I have used Hunkydory products in my creations. They produce a huge range of papercraft supplies, and their pre-printed and pre-diecut toppers with co-ordinating paper and card are great because they are perfect for beginners to use in simple cardmaking and yet versatile enough for more experienced crafters to make more complicated designs. I often use them for fancy-fold cards, so I can concentrate on the card shape and have the artwork all ready to add.

So I was delighted when Hunkydory asked me to review some of their products and allowed me to choose some items to review. All my current Hunkydory supplies are very feminine and floral so I decided to try some of their masculine products for a complete change. Many crafters find it hard to make cards for men, and Hunkydory have a lot of products to help with that.

The items I chose were the A4 pad and topper deck from the Planes, Trains and Automobiles collection  and, to use for matting alongside them,  the Colour Families Paper Pack in brown.

All I've needed to add, apart from adhesive and card blanks, is a few brads and some candi.

For me the topper pack is the real star attraction - it contains 54 heavyweight card toppers featuring various cars, planes, ships and planes, all in a vintage style with details of each one. There are several of each design (I didn't stop to count, and being a patience player my first action was to shuffle the cards as if they were a deck of playing cards!). The artwork is stunning and the cards themselves good, sturdy, high quality cards that give a luxury feel to the finished card. And an extra touch that I love - on the car cards, it tells us the original price of the car. How times - and prices - have changed.

The A4 pad is designed to compliment the toppers, with double sided papers to work with the land, sea and air themes. It's unusual to find papers that are A4 rather than square, and as a cardmaker rather than a scrapbooker I often find 12 x 12 papers don't cut into convenient sizes without a lot of waste. I really love the designs, especially the collage ones which remind me of the cigarette cards that my Dad used to collect as a boy in the 1930s. However the semi-gloss papers are shinier than I am used to and, having had issues stamping on glossy paper in the past, I'm reluctant to try stamping on them. I got around the stamping issue on the card I wanted to add a sentiment to, by digging out my old peel-off greetings. I notice that Hunkydory sell a book of die cut sentiments which I think would be useful with this glossy paper.

Each theme section of the papers includes a scene - rail tracks, mountain roads, sky or sea, and this scene is a full A4 sheet. While it can be cut up into smaller sections and still look beautiful, few crafters regularly make A4 sized cards and it seems a pity not to have the chance to use the whole scene, so I'd have liked to see one or two sheets in the pad show a pair of A5 scenes side-by-side as well.

Finally the Colour Families paper - this too is semi glossy, so presents the same challenge to stamping, but it die cuts absolutely beautifully! Being thinner than cardstock, you need to add a piece of scrap paper between the die and your cutting plate, otherwise the die can get embedded in the cutting plate (don't ask me how I know that) but you can see from the tiny teeth on my die cut cogs that the paper comes out of the die cleanly and easily without bending or tearing.

Disclaimer - I was sent these products to review but all opinions are my own, and with lots of paper sand toppers left you are going to be seeing a lot more makes using them over the next few months!