Did you know that you can make eight different greeting cards with little more than one sheet of 8 1/2 x 11″ patterned paper, four sheets of 8 1/2 x 11″ and perhaps a few embellishments? Well, you can, and I’m going to show you.
This technique is called “one sheet wonders”, and no, I did not invent it. It’s made the rounds of various crafty message boards over the years. I used this technique to make Christmas cards to send out, but this would also make a nice gift of coordinating note cards. Just package it up nicely, in a box or in one of those cellophane bags from a craft store, add envelopes and tie it up with a ribbon, and voila! A nice and inexpensive gift! Not as fancy as a dream trip to vegas, but hey, times are tough! A handmade gift shows that you put some thought and effort into it, much nicer than buying some cheapy bauble at the dollar store.
What You Will Need:
- One 8 1/2 x 11″ sheet of patterned paper
- Four 8 1/2 x 11″ sheets of cardstock, color coordinated with the patterned paper
- Ruler
- Scissors or paper trimmer
- Adhesive
- Your choice of embellishments (die-cuts, stickers, additional paper/cardstock, etc.)
- Template (provided below)
Each sheet of cardstock is to be cut in half on the horizontal, to make two cards that measure 4 1/4 x 5 1/2 inches.
This is the template for cutting your patterned paper. You can click on it to see a larger one. What I like to do is flip my paper over to the blank side, and measure and mark it that way.
See the squiggly line between the two pieces for Card #3? Make that cut with a pair of deckle-ediged or other decorate-edge scissors, if you have them. If not, just carefully tear it, you want sort of uneven edges here.
Once you have all of the pieces cut out, it’s time to go to town and assembe your cards.  There is no right or wrong way to do this. So I’ll just show you what I did with mine.
Rather than use pre-made patterned paper, I made my own by stamping on an 8 1/2 x 11″ sheet of white cardstock, with red and green inks. The kitty with holly stamp is from Magenta, the solid holly stamp is from Posh Impressions, and I don’t remember where I got the pawprint and “Meow” stamps.
Cards #1 and #2 are pretty much identical. You can orient the cards any way you want, here I did one with the fold horizontally and one vertically. You can see how I repeated the kitty design on the solid colored card. I stamped it with white pigment ink, and heat embossed it with white embossing powder, to make it stand out. I spelled out “Meowy Catmas” with die-cut letters…the ones here are from Quickutz.  But don’t go looking for these specific fonts, they’ve long since been discontinued. Sorry!
If you don’t have a die-cutting system, you can always use letter stickers, which are pretty inexpensive to buy.
Finally, I finished these off by adhering ribbon, as shown.
The rest of the cards are after the jump.
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