Saturday, August 20, 2011

Hold Your Horses!

So I did have the aforementioned crafty weekend last weekend. I made my entire inventory of pony cards for the fall season. As I get set to go back to school and practice for my road test, I'm worried I'll be scrambling to make stuff! My friends took my husband out and Muffin and I worked hard!

I took some pictures so that people can understand just how labour intensive a card can be. First, there's the ponies! The original pony card was made for my friend Noela Jewelry. I translated the pattern to my Pazzles craft cutter, but even that took some work perfecting as the software is fussy. Anyway, I cut a variety of bodies, manes, and tails.

Next comes drawing the eyes. Each eye is hand drawn and coloured with a fine marker. I use a dud pony as a template. It takes about a minute to draw each eye. Then I dot each one with a white Souffle marker to make it pop. Lastly, the manes and tails are glued on and decorated with Copic markers. By the time I got to the 30th pony, I was pretty worn out!


Once the ponies are assembled, I still need to assemble the cards. I cut 8.5x11" paper in half, then fold the halves, to make quarter fold cards. I use pastel colours because I like the way they show through the paper underneath. I print out a background, run it through the adhesive cartrige of my Xyron, and then stick it onto the cardstock. I could use white cardstock and just print the image, but full-bleed on scored cardstock is tricky for my printer.


I have a few designs - clouds, a rainbow and pasture.


But wait, there's more! The first batch of cards featured glitter stamped onto them. The glitter, while very fun, was very messy! I tried to move away from that with the second batch, but I didn't have an ink that was metallic enough. For this batch, I took a chance buying Tsukineko Brilliance metallic ink. It's really shimmery! The only thing I didn't like was that I found the little containers hard to open and I dropped them a few times :\


So 60 impressions later, the ponies are ready to go on the cards! It takes about 5-6 pieces of adhesive squares to secure on to a card. All the cards are blank inside, and some ponies get stickers on their rumps! Here are some of my favourites from this batch:


So far it seems like the most popular colour is white, which really surprised me. A few people have said to me, independently, that maybe it's because white is associated with unicorns. I dunno! We'll see what colour emerges the true winner after Christmas.

5 comments:

  1. Congrats, Christine! That's a lot of hard work, and these are cute as a button!! You're inspiring me to get ready for my October Show, thank you =) Kathryn

    ReplyDelete
  2. Labor intensive--but awesome! Love the color combos!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Wow Christine, you truly never know how much work goes into a piece of art! They are all wonderful!

    ReplyDelete
  4. You can never start too early getting prepared for shows Kathryn! They're so amazingly intense. This market is extra tiring because they play a lot of loud music and not all the bands are very good, LOL!

    I figure if I don't show how much effort goes into them, no one will value them as much :-) A lot of decisions go into the colours Deb! It's crazy...I don't want the to be just pink either.

    Thanks Stacy :-) It is hard to put time and value on a handmade item. I figure each card takes about 20 minutes altogether.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Wow!!! I love them all. I grew up watching My Little Pony, and so I really love these. Looks like a lot of fun, but hard work making them.

    ReplyDelete