One Sheet Wonder Card Project

As it goes with most of my projects they start from something I have seen on Pinterest or YouTube.  I follow about 20 different card bloggers and love all the beautiful cards they make.  And more importantly how easy it looks when they put them together.  Take some paper, a few stamps, and in 5 minutes you have this gorgeous card.  Well, not so much in my craft room.  Take some paper, a few stamps, and three hours later have a card that looks like it was hit by a bus before being finished.



This project started from a post on Craftsy.com regarding One Sheet wonder cards.
The premise is you take one 12 x 12 sheet of patterned paper and in a couple hours with a few extra supplies you get 12-14 different cards.    The instructions in the above referenced post were put together very nicely and made it quite easy for me to convert this into a silhouette cut file.

I liked the way the  cards in the original post had a plain colored paper border.  To achieve this I took the measurements list in the post and created shapes to match in Silhouette Studio.  I started by just putting lines in at each of the divisions listed on the original post.  I then added boxes in with the listed measurements reduced by .125 inches on all sides.

To make for easy cutting since I would be using the same cut file on two sheets of paper I took the offset shapes and changed the line colors to grey and left the initial lines red.  I put my plain sheet of paper on the mat.  To adjust the cut settings to only cut the red lines I selected the cut settings.  Then selected advanced, line by color and then select only red.

After cutting the plain piece of paper I took my patterned paper and put in on the mat.  I adjusted the cut settings to cut just the grey lines.

Once all the pieces were cut I sorted them and adhered them together.  This took a lot longer than I expected them too.  Mostly because I am a perfectionist and had to have them just right.  I took 14 sheets of card stock and cut and scored my card bases to have top folding A2 cards and the other half side folding A2 cards.  Next steps were figuring out my sentiments.  I had read on Jennifer McGuire's blog about a card drive there were doing called the Last Hearts Card drive.  You can find more information in this post here.  I varied my sentiments between foiling and embossing.  I was quite pleased when these were finished.  I did have to use a few more sheets of paper to create additional borders but all in all I made 14 cards in one afternoon!  This was a major accomplishment.

Looking to see if I could improve on the initial try I decided to do this again with a new sheet of patterned paper and some additional supplies.  The one thing that seemed to slow me down was adhering the patterned paper to the plain paper and getting the borders just right.  This time around I decided to cut the patterned paper first.  I removed it from the mat and kept the outline to use later as a guide.  I then cut the plain paper and this time left it on the mat.  I used the border previously cut from the patterned paper to help make matching easier.  This worked a lot better and went a lot quicker.  Once again these weren't perfect but got the job done.

For the next set of sentiments I varied them between birthdays, thank yous and just because cards.  The turned out quite lovely and I was once again thrilled at how many cards I finished in such a short amount of time. With all the cards done now I decided they needed envelopes.  I had just received a beautiful 180 page patterned paper book for Christmas that fit perfectly with the theme.  I followed the instructions for envelope making that came with my We R Memory Keepers Envelope Punch.

If you need to make a bunch of cards pretty quickly I would highly recommend doing these one sheet wonder type cards.  You can start with the measurements referenced in the Craftsy.com post or create your own.  I would love to see some examples if you do give this a shot.