Themes For Home Made Greetings Cards. Part I Infants and Toddlers

You would not believe how many emails and messages we get asking us to suggest a Card theme for "A Teenager" a "Six Year Old" my "Mother in Law" etc. etc. etc.

We thought we'd do a short series of posts giving some ideas, obviously drawing on the resources at Free Craft Downloads. When we first started Free Craft Downloads the idea was to build up a library of papers. Maybe not "great" papers but a library of free papers where crafters could go, even at the last minuet and hopefully find a papers to suit their needs.


Themes for Infants and Toddlers.

Firstly for young children,the card will be as much to amuse the parents as it will be the child. Card colours tend to be fairly stereotype(ish) with Pinkish for the girls and a range of Blues for the boys. Although there are a great number of  Cartoon Characters which you can use on these papers the old "Number" Theme remains popular and is a good choice if you aren't too sure of the Childs interests, Teddy Bears are also a good standby.. Free Craft Downloads has Nuber based Backing Papers, Inserts, Tags, Template and even a bit of decoupage. Using these together will help you make a suitable card for any aged child even at late notice.

Resources

Backing Paper, Inserts and Tags

• Baby Papers (plus Decoupage)
• Embossed Numbers
• Teddy Bear

Decoupage

• Embossed Numbers
• Teddy Bears and Trains

Templates

• Number Templates
• Number Templates2
• Number Templates3 

Brewster Design

I thought some of you might be interested in see how Brewster Developed. So here are a few of the early images.
I have been asked a few time "why" Brewster came about. Well most of our basic images come from either stuff we have made or public domain images which we alter to suit our needs. After three years of making Free Papers we though it would be nice to have a character who we could use in a range  or papers and in a wide variety of designs. So far with Brewster we have made Free Decoupage, Cross Stitch kits and Scrap booking layouts. He has been both a newspapers vendor and a teacher. Both of these situations were chosen as they gave scope for the designs to be personalised either on the A Board or the Blackboard.

Next week will see Brewster in a festive spirit and again will have scope for personalisation.

We would obviously like to add our than to our illustrator "Mike" for doing all the hard work on each original image and for being able to turn my garbled instructions in to something fantastic.....

Next Year Brewster will be picking up some friends and maybe even a love interest in time for Valentines Day... stay tuned for further news :-)

Card Making and Colours

As is fairly normal, I was sitting making some of the free backing papers the other afternoon with the television on in the background, can't remember exactly which channel but it was one og the shopping telly craft shows so probably either QVC or Create and Craft.

Anyway my attention was suddenly drawn to what they were saying "These colours are so in this year" and "These are going to be next seasons colours". I was honestly going to turn over as I assumed the schedule had moved on to a cloths programme but no, it was still on a card making programme and this was then talking about a set of papers they were selling.

So is it just me or is it really stupid talking about card making papers in this way. I know there are some conventions, lots of reds and greens for Christmas papers, blacks and greys for sympathy ones and I do tend to do my Christening papers and Baby papers in pastel blues and pinks, but are is there really such a thing as "thins seasons colours (pastel green if I remember rightly in this case) or is it just another way of them getting us to buy yet another set of papers?