I’ve been having fun designing “little red truck” digital paintings for a friend who needs greeting cards. I’ve posted the technical bits of the digital side on my business site (https://carynscreations.com/blog/), but I thought I would go into the hand finishing here and provide some tips and tricks that I’ve found along the way.

So the first hurdle was getting my image to print properly on my printer. When I would print from the computer, the colors would be faded and streaked. My printer has the capability to print pictures from USB, so I made my image a JPG, transferred it to USB, and printed directly from USB to printer. The print took forever to produce, but when it was done, it was glorious and imperfection free! And I print on 100% recycled card stock, which makes my heart happy.

The next challenge was making a fancy cut on the front edge of the card. I bought a couple patterned scissors, but they are fiddly and are difficult to line up. So instead I designed some edges and used my Cricut to cut them. So much easier and faster than scissors or an x-acto knife.

Although I have an electronic cutter, I did not want to buy an embossing machine. I discovered embossing folders and found that if you wet the paper and use a rolling pin or stick to press down on the folder, you can skip the machine. I have a modest set of four embossing folders. I need to figure a way to design and make my own, because that would just be cool.

The next card improvement was aging the edge to give the card an antique look. I tried brushing the edge with a chalk ink pad, but was not pleased with the results. Instead, I broke out my water colors and used a sepia colored liquid ink. I like the effect best if I pre-wet the card edges, then carefully apply the diluted water color to the edge, so capillary action spreads the color in a pleasing way.

Finally, all that wetness added to do embossing and edge aging makes the cards a little warped. I found that it was easy and effective to run the cards through my hot lamination machine (without a lamination folder).

The cards, with a 100% recycled kraft brown envelope, are available for purchase on my Etsy site. If they are gone, I will make more. I do make sure that the pictures are of the actual item, rather than stating “items may vary” because I think it is important to see pictures of exactly what you are buying.