Making Greeting Cards with Fabric and Paper

Making a quick and easy greeting card is easier than you think. You just need a little inspiration and some fabric scraps and maybe about 5, 10 minutes. I love whipping these up whenever I have something to give to a friend. I like to put gift cards in them or just, you know, send a little note in the mail or hand deliver it. Here are a couple of ones just to give you some ideas. I just took these loose strips. I cut this. I was cutting down some fabric to make it nice and neat edge. And I had this thin strip and I just wove those together and then secured the edges with stitching. Of course, I did a sneaky trick. I taped down the edges first with double-stick tape and then of the horizontal lines. And then I wove in the vertical lines. And just kind of makes this fun basket weave. And I like these extra fibers on the edges. But of course, if you don't like those, you could pink the edges so that they wouldn't. Or use fleece or something that won't unravel, a knit. And then here's another type that is the opening form of greeting card where I put this fun trim on and sewed some little balloons with their strings coming down. So you just kinda fussy cut those out and then do some top stitching here to show it. You don't really need to back stitch whenever you're stitching these on, because they'll be secured to the paper with the stitching and it's not something that's going to be weared. And you know, it's not a garment. It's not gonna get moved around a lot. And then I just zigzag stitch that on. Now, when you are sewing these, you need to think about how you're gonna write on the card. So in this, it's on this side of the card. And unless I was writing a long note, it would be fine. And back here I have the square and I can just write within the square and that's okay. If you're worried about writing on kind of the sort of bumpiness of the back, write on it first and then stitch it on, stitch the final stuff, on and it'll be perfect. So let's see what all we need. I made, I've got this one here up for us. I've put together some scraps. And what I like to do is take a base piece of fabric and sew everything to it first. So I cut out some hearts and I just stitched those on with a single line so that eventually they can kind of pop up and be loosey goose and kind of fluttery and fun. And I just cut out a basic heart shape and went to town with that. And then stitched it on. Now I do have some interfacing on the back here. If you don't wanna go to the trouble of interfacing the piece before you sew it to a greeting card, which you absolutely don't have to, you could just go ahead and start by stitching it onto a piece of paper that's the same size as whatever you're working on. And then you can tape the paper to the card. The other thing to remember is that once you sew with a needle on your machine through paper, that needle should only be used for paper going forward. It dulls the needle very, very quickly. And you don't want to have any. If you to sew a garment later with fabric later, for something specific, it will probably cause some problems with your machine. So this one's kind of all ready to go. And I'm making this little card to send to one of my nieces and tell her good luck. So I can, what I'm gonna do is put some double-stick tape on it. On the back. And, again, here I'm thinking I'm gonna sew the heart shape on and it might be hard to then write her a note on the other side. Especially cause it'll be sticky, or because it'll be bumpy. But I'll show you that when I'm finished sewing it on, we can put a card on the back to secure that so. Just some double-stick tape. It's very sticky. On the back there. And get it positioned on my card exactly how I want it. And I got these purple cards on sale actually at the grocery store. And they were just plain cards. And I thought, well, that's easy peasy. So just be on the lookout for fun-colored card stock. But you could of course do it on white as well. So I'm just gonna stitch the perimeter of this little heart here so that it looks good. And you can do all different sorts of stitches. I'll probably do a zigzag stitch so that it's sort of decorative and fun. And this zigzag stitch looks good. You don't really, as I said, you don't really need to worry about back stitching. Especially because with this, we're going to be coming back around on our stitches 'cause we're sewing the perimeter. And just let it move along as it goes. And now this needle will never be used for fabric, unless it's fabric and paper again. Because I've used it on this project. And I'm just kind of carefully marking it. Now, one thing I do like to do is when I'm doing my zigzag is when I get to a point, I make sure that the zigzag goes in to the point and then I pivot. So that there's not a weird set of couple's zigzags overlapping at the bottom, which I'll show you when we pull this off. And zigzag up and away. So you can make these cards for anything. You can cut out words instead of hearts and tape them on or glue them on. Or you can write on top of the card with fabric markers, even, after you're finished if you want. If sewing words is. Getting a little off my heart so I'm gonna go ahead and stop and pivot for a second. There we go. And around, around the bend. And I probably spent a few minutes putting together the little heart shapes on this. Maybe five, six minutes. And then all I have to do is put this perimeter on. One more. There we go. Off we go. And, of course, whenever you need a greeting card now, you can give something handmade that says, I love you and I was thinking of you today while I was crafting. You know, card for every occasion. Start your own little card shop. Okay. And I'm just gonna go over the original stitches briefly. We would, of course, trim our threads. But there you go. You can see that when we got down to the bottom here, I zigzagged in before I pivoted so that I wouldn't have extra stitches down there. Came up to the top and the stitches were going to be on top of each other anyway. So I tried to make sure it was carefully still catching the fabric and the paper at the same time. And on the back I have this heart, so I could write inside the heart. But if I'm afraid of the bumpiness, I could just take a second card, write on it first and glue it in place or tape it in place. And that would be my card right there. Cute little greeting card to make just real quick in a few minutes before you head out the door to the next party you're going to. I hope you enjoyed sewing these. I've enjoyed teaching you.