Happy Mail!

Sentiments are not my forte. Often I am not sure which sentiment to use and I like cards without sentiments quite a bit. However cards often need sentiments to be complete so today I decided to work with the sentiments instead of fighting them.

In fact I decided to build my own sentiments to make them uniquely mine.


I started by looking at my Altenew stamp sets to see if i could build something up myself. This proved a bit complicated, I have a lot of stamps and I had a hard time combining them so I did something crazy, yes crazy.
I decided to type all the sentiments of all my stamp sets into an Excel spreadsheet, I know, I am mad! 


Not only did I type out every sentiment but I also added information about the size and style of writing as well as which set the sentiment came from. 
Even though I am a fast typist, this took me a couple of hours... BUT I am really happy I did because now I can search in my spreadsheet and find the words I want to combine, I can also look for specific words. It's great.


So today I needed a couple of birthday cards and so I searched through my data base and found several snippets that I could put together to stamp my custom, unique sentiment on my cards.
  • "just wanted to say" from Halftone Hello
  • "hope you have the", "best" and "sweet" and "friend" from Folksy Florals
  • "birthday" from Halftone Happy
I arranged these words in my MISTI to see how I wanted them and came up with the above.


To stamp them on my cards I actually removed all the words and started at the very bottom stamping the word friend in a dark grey ink. The MISTI allows for a very precise placement and lets you make duplicates so I made two cards in slightly different colors. 

My next word was "sweet" so after removing "friend" from the MISTI I stamped "sweet" very close by, in pink on one card and in green on the second card.


Then I kept going, stamping one word after the other, placing them exactly where I wanted the word to be - for example look at the letter "y" in the the word "birthday" - I was able to fit it nice and snug in between the two "ee" in "sweet".


Then I added some very simple stamping using two of the flowers from Folksy Flowers. 
I kept the color palette very colorful and happy, these Altenew inks were used for these cards:
Aqualicious
Fresh Lemon
Puffy Heart
Rubellite
Bamboo
Cloudy Night
Charcoal Suit


To complete the design I wanted to add a little heart next to the "friend" word and decided to go for some puffy stickers from my stash, I was lucky to have some in matching colors!


The last thing needed was a custom envelope and stamp, John Lennon seemed to go well with these cards!


Do you think the recipients of these cards will be happy? I'd love to hear your opinion! Oh and by the way, I'd be happy to share my spreadsheet if anyone is interested - it has some 60 Altenew sets all included, maybe you have some or many of them. Let me know in the comments below if you are interested.


Inspiration for these cards came from a very cool class that seemed tailor made for me; Sentiments with Impact, taught by the excellent Emily Leiphart - a really fun class!




All I need to do now is add all the sentiments from my Hero Arts, Concord & 9th, Simons Says Stamp etc. I had better get cracking!

Hugs
Helen


Comments

  1. Very nice cards, and I love the coordinating envelope, too! What is the spreadsheet you mentioned at the end? Thanks for the inspiration, and great job on the sentiment you created!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Val, thanks for your kind message. I made a spreadsheet with all the sentiments from all my Altenew stamp sets to be able to find any sentiment easily.

      Delete
  2. WOW! I love these happy-looking cards! Your choice of colours is what makes these cards pop! Great work, Helen.
    Thank you for entering your gorgeous work to the AECP gallery.

    ReplyDelete

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