card making of old

Over the last few weeks I have been sorting out my craft room and have found some boxes of cards I made about 20 years ago.  These cards were made  long before Stampin' Up came to the UK..

The cards brought back some memories of my early days of card making,  so I thought I 'd share a few of them with you.

Maybe this post will bring back memories for some of you too.

  Crafting products for card making was in those days very limited. The most popular products for card making were mulberry paper,  peel offs, (as in the card above)  pre- made toppers were popular, embossing was done using  brass stencils, a light  box and a ball tool.  I remember how much my hand ached after an hour of embossing in this  way.

Punches were of poor quality and most of them were tiny unappealing designs.

As for  the range of stamps,.....it was pretty good as I  recall.   But the range of products for colouring was           very disappointing.

I remember trying to colour images with watercolours, pearlescent paint blocks, water colour crayons, felt tip pens,  but the best option was Marvy Le Plume pens, but they were pretty expensive for a dye based pen,  and to my mind, were not worth the money. 

 I always got terrible results when colouring images, so my stamps got packed away,  not to see daylight again for over 15 years.

As I didn't have much joy stamping,  I began making cards using things like wallpaper, cake decorations, purchased paper flowers, packing tape and anything I thought might look good on a card.

 The planet card above is made from a wallpaper sample with a stamped sentiment (I made this one recently as an example for this post).

 The card  on the left is an old example of a simple card I made using printed packing tape, which I'd picked up in one of those cheapy stores.

The ribbler created a corrugated card look (used on the flower card below). It was a very popular gadget and ribbed card appeared on everyone's cards in abundance,.... except  mine. 

 I could never get the card to feed through straight, no matter how careful I was.

  I always ended up having to trim so much off to get it straight again that all I was left with was a narrow strip of ribbed card.

 I wasted so much card and paper trying to use the ribbler that I got rid of it.

I really liked the effect, so I was pleased to see that Stampin' Up have brought out an embossing folder that creates the same effect. I haven't bought it yet, but it is on my wish list.

I haven't  used these things in my card making for many years, but since I have re discovered these cards I may start including a few of these products.