A Year of Cards

I haven't really made any New Year's Resolutions, but I do want to be a bit more organised with my card-making as I have two terrible habits that I need to change: firstly, when I see a challenge that I like, I make a card for it without any particular person in mind; secondly, when a birthday is coming up I assume that I will have a card to suit (from my first habit) and when I discover that I don't I end up making a new one at the very last moment.

I've written a list of all the people that I make cards for each year, and it's only 20 so not too onerous. As I make each challenge card this year, I want to be making it for a specific person so that I have exactly the right card ready to go when the date arrives. I've been thinking about this for a while, and I've already made one (back in October), but as I prepared to make the second one, my thoughts turned to how I will store and organise the cards themselves and I remembered a Bo Bunny card organiser kit that I won a few years ago. It's been languishing on a shelf ever since, but last weekend I pulled it out and assembled it at last.

The kit is called A Year of Cards and comes with eight chipboard pages, all the papers needed to cover them and an assortment of chipboard and die-cut flowers for decoration.

Starting with the cover, I found that the orange scalloped chipboard was just a little shorter than the page, not much but enough to upset me so I didn't use it. I swapped the brown twill provided for a silkier ribbon and added the two flowers shown, but not the green button as I thought the flower middle was prettier without it. I also dropped the 'a year of' letter stickers and just used the 'cards' chipboard pieces.

Inside the album, I kept things fairly simple. Each page has a patterned paper at the top, another at the bottom, stuck on three sides only to make a pocket, and a strip across the top of each pocket. The kit includes chipboard circles to stick on and label each pair of pages (Jan/Feb, Mar/Apr etc) but I chose not to use them as I was concerned about both their bulk and their longevity as they didn't seem secure. Instead I used some months stickers from My Mind's Eye to label each page.

There are extra die-cut and chipboard embellishments for the pages, but I like the clean and simple look of the pages as they are so I didn't use them. The whole album is about 7" by 11" and just about holds a 4x6 card vertically, though I'll probably keep them horizontally as shown in the February pocket.

Here's looking forward to a productive and organised card-making year...