Halloween Sign - K and Company - Create for Less Blog Post

One of my favorite ways to decorate my home for various holidays is to decorate precut wooden signs. The sign I decorated here came in white, but these also come in black. Since they aren’t raw wood, it saves the step of having to paint them. If you find a raw wooden sign though don’t be frightened! A quick paint job and you are ready to decorate.

I used:
K&Co Grand Adhesions Stickers

K&Co Halloween Mat Pad

Black Ink such as Clearsnap

Therm O’ Web Super Tape

Wooden Sign

For this project I reached for one of the Halloween Mat Pads by K&Co, they were the perfect size (4.75″ x 6.75″) as I didn’t waste a lot of paper when tracing. The mat pads have two sided papers – one printed, one solid – and all papers coordinate together. On my sign I varied between patterns and solids. Decide which paper you want to use, trace the letter with a pencil and cut out. This sign had some areas I couldn’t trace very well so on those areas I put the paper over the sign and pressed around the edges to find where I should trace. Since I was planning to shabby this up, I wasn’t worried about pencil lines. If you don’t want to erase the lines and aren’t going shabby, flip the sign over and trace on the back side of the paper before cutting out.

After tracing and cutting out the letters (you may need to do a little trimming), it’s time to crinkle your paper. If you don’t want such a rough looking crinkle you can spray with water first or even iron some of the wrinkles out. You then take your ink pad to the wrinkles and add ink to the edges and wrinkles. I also rubbed my ink pad around the edges of the letters on my sign so everything would blend into the bright white sign better. To adhere I recommend an extra sturdy tape such as Therm O’ Web Super Tape. I then added some of the coordinating Grand Adhesions Halloween Stickers to the sign.

You can often find these word signs on clearance after the holidays or sometimes even before if they are damaged. This sign had a couple chips in the letters and I easily covered them up with paper and some ink. The next time you see a wooden wood sign at a store, get out your scrapbooking supplies and decorate!

Cardstock, Punches and Paper Crimper - and Glue Dots!

*This is a recent post of mine over at the Create for Less blog.

I wanted to show that you can make a card without a scrap of patterned paper. All I used were a few different colors of cardstock, some punches and a few small simple embellishments. I love texture on my projects, but I always forget about my paper crimper, so I decided to pull him out for this project. It’s fun to rediscover “old” tools that you loved, but may have forgotten about.

Supplies:
Bazzill Blue Dotted Swiss cardstock. You can also use a plain blue piece of cardstock and run it thru the Cuttlebug with the Swiss Dots Embossing folder.

Bazzill Cardstock - greens, brown, pink

Pebbles Thank You Rub-on

Making Memories Wedding Pearls

Martha Stewart Butterfly Punch

Martha Stewart Edge Punch Arch Lattice

Marvy Uchida Paper Crimper

EK Paper Shapers Circle Punch 1 1/2″

Buttons - green

Glue Dots

All Night Media Pop Dots

Directions:

• After creating the card base, it is time to make the tree trunk. Draw a tree trunk on the brown cardstock, cut out and run thru the paper crimper. Adhere the trunk to your card.


• Next get out your 1 1/2″ circle punch and punch circles from two different shades of green cardstock. (If you do not have a punch, you can trace circles and cut or use a circle cutter).


• Run the light green circles thru the paper crimper to give them added dimension on the tree.


• Layer and adhere the dark green circles to the card – overlapping the trunk.


• Layer the light green circles on top of the dark green circles, adding pop dots behind a few for dimension. Use Glue Dots on the other dark and light green circles.


• Punch three butterflies from pink cardstock. Adhere two to the tree “leaves” and one to the trunk.


• Add pearls to the centers of the butterflies.


• Use your border punch on the dark green cardstock to make grass. Adhere to the bottom of the card.


• Apply sentiment rub-on.


• Adhere 3 buttons on each side of the sentiment using Glue Dots.