How To Make the Easiest Handmade Photo Greeting Card

I originally published this tutorial over at Crafting a Green World.

A super cute personalized greeting card is just a photo away!

The season of graduation parties is upon us! I’ve been running the joy gauntlet of 2+ graduation parties every weekend all month, and with my very own brand-new college graduate home for a few weeks, I’ve also been helping (i.e. nagging, prodding, fussing…) her prepare thank-you cards for the generous souls who added her graduation to their own May gauntlet.

I know, I know she’s grown and should be able to write and send her own thank-you cards without me nagging. Just let me get this one last thing off my mental list and then I promise not to care if she never writes another thank-you card again.

For all these occasions (and for most other occasions, too!), photo greeting cards are the perfect solution. They’re adorable as congratulations cards, especially with a photo of the recipient of your congratulations on the front–for a graduation card, ideally one from their toddler years! They also make perfect thank-you cards, especially with a cute photo of the gift-giver and the recipient together. And if you’ve got a hard drive full of Senior pictures, those thank-you notes for graduation checks is a great time to use them.

But my favorite part of these particular handmade photo cards is that the photo isn’t glued or taped to the front of the card, so that the recipient can, if they so wish, simply pop the photo out of its holder and allow it to take its rightful position on their refrigerator door.

Mental note: photo magnets would also be good for this project!

This really is the easiest project, totally do-able even if you’re not a scrapbooker or cardmaker, just as totally do-able if you don’t consider yourself crafty at all. Here’s how!

Materials

• photos. All the photos in this particular project are 4″x6″, printed via one-hour photo from the cheapest big-box store I could find (and the quality shows it, but whatever), but you can use absolutely any photo of any size here, or a postcard, or original artwork, etc. Just scale the greeting card accordingly, if the photo is larger.
• cardstock. An 8.5″x11″ piece or an 8″x10″ piece would work equally well here.
• photo corners. This is the secret to THE quickest, easiest, and cutest photo cards! Photo corners are cheap as hell, made from paper so they’re not crap for the environment, and come in every color to match any photo.
• measuring, cutting, and folding tools. I used a metal ruler, paper cutter, and bone folder.

Step 1: Measure and cut the card to size.

For use with a 4″x6″ photo, your cardstock should be cut to 7″x10″. If you’re using an 8.5″x11″ piece of cardstock, cut 1.5″ off of the short side, and 1″ off of the long side.

Step 2: Fold the greeting card in half.

Fold the cardstock in half, making sure the two short sides meet as precisely as possible. Smooth over the fold with a bone folder (or the fat handle of a butter knife!) to make the crease look nice and neat. This is your greeting card blank!

Step 3: Put a photo on the front of the greeting card.

Ignore that my photo is on the wrong side of the unfolded greeting card here, lol. I guess another good thing about this method is that when you realize you’ve put your photo on the wrong side of the card, you can just flip the photo upside down, since it’s not stuck to the card! You can also just as easily make a landscape greeting card instead of this portrait one.

Wrong side or not, the above photo does at least illustrate how the photo should be placed, .5″ from both the top and bottom edges of the card, and .5″ from the left and right edges.

The laziest method for attaching the photo corners is also the easiest method! Instead of doing any additional measuring, just firmly hold the photo in place while you put each photo corner on and stick it down to the card.

If you took the photo off, the photo corners on the front of the greeting card would look like this:

To finish, put your completed greeting card into a standard 5″x7″ greeting card envelope, or do what I do and take five additional seconds to DIY the envelope, too!

I get bored doing the same thing over and over, and I had a LOT of greeting cards to DIY this month, so as you can see if you look closely at the above image, I’ve got one more easy DIY photo greeting card tutorial to share with you (and it’s not even the washi taped one up in the left corner–that was literally just me wanting to use up the last bit of washi tape on the roll, ahem). Stay tuned for next week, when I’ll show you how to make a photo greeting card that’s approximately 1% more work but 50% cuter!

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How to Embroider A Pair of Converse For David Bowie's Biggest Fan

I originally published this tutorial over at Crafting a Green World.

Yep, you can embroider your favorite pair of Converse to create totally custom shoes!

Y’all, this might be the coolest project I’ve ever taken on. This birthday present for my kid who’s David Bowie’s biggest fan and only ever wears black-on-black Converse on her feet may have destroyed all sensation in my right index fingertip (mental note: thimbles put the “fun” in functional fingers!), but it was worth it for how great these shoes turned out.

The process is long and tedious–and awful on your fingers if you don’t wear a thimble!–but it’s also very easy, absolutely suitable for a beginner sewist. Here’s how you can make your own custom pair of Converse!

Materials

To embroider Converse, you will need the following supplies:

• canvas shoes. The canvas material is the important part here, so any canvas shoe will do. I embroidered on a pair of monochrome black Converse high-tops, but I’m also kind of eyeing the grey ones for myself.
• self-adhesive water-soluble embroidery paper. This is often referred to as “stick n’ stitch” paper, because you can stick it down to a surface just like a sticker, and then embroider directly on top of it. When you’re finished, the paper rinses away with water. You can usually print on this paper with an inkjet printer, as well, which is so great for transferring more detailed designs. If you don’t have an inkjet printer but want to make a more elaborate design, you can use regular printer paper instead, but you will have to pick all the bits of paper out of your stitching afterwards, which is a pain.
• embroidery floss and needle. Two strands of embroidery floss is perfect here. Use the sharpest hand-sewing needle you can get, and don’t forget a thimble!

Step 1: Place the template onto the shoe.

This step would have been easier for me if I owned an inkjet printer. For the lightning bolt design, I cut the overall design out of the adhesive paper, then drew on the color blocking details in pen. I tried a few methods for getting the “Rebel Rebel” cross-stitch design onto the Converse, including trying to draw a grid onto the adhesive paper (so time-consuming!) and trying to use the perforations in the adhesive paper as my stitching template (my poor myopic eyes!), but ultimately I just stuck the printer paper with the design printed onto it directly onto the Converse. It doesn’t have to be perfect as long as it gets done!

Step 2: Embroider Converse according to the pattern.

I used a running stitch, backstitch, cross stitch, and satin stitch for this project, with the backstitch being the most useful for the lightning bolt, and the cross stitch the only stitch I used for the “Rebel Rebel.” For the lightning bolt, I outlined each part in the color I wanted it to be using a backstitch. I used a satin stitch to fill the narrow blue and black color blocks, and more back stitching to fill the red lightning bolt.

I would not recommend a satin stitch for the lightning bolt, because the thread has to cover too much area. It’ll sag over time and be very vulnerable to breakage.

Below, you can see how I cross-stitched the “Rebel Rebel” design directly onto the printer paper pattern. I didn’t end up needing the adhesive paper that I’d already placed there, but it doesn’t add bulk to stitch through and it rinses away easily, so I left it:

Step 3: Remove the pattern paper.

To remove the water-soluble adhesive paper, just rinse the canvas under the faucet for a few minutes and it will come away. To remove the printer paper template, first tear away as much as you can, then soak the canvas until the paper is thoroughly waterlogged. That makes it easier to pick away the remaining paper bits under your stitching using tweezers. It will be a LOT easier to do if your pattern isn’t entirely cross-stitch, ugh!

Optionally, you can cover the back of your embroidery with fusible interfacing designed for exactly that, but I decided to leave the back of my stitching as-is. I didn’t put any knots into the floss, instead hiding the ends well inside the layers of canvas and padding, so it shouldn’t be uncomfortable, and I don’t *think* friction will be an issue, either. But the kid comes home from college for the summer in just a couple of weeks, so if it looks like the embroidery floss is becoming worn on the inside, I can always place interfacing down before it becomes a problem. If it happens, I’ll let you know!

David Bowie’s biggest fan LOVES her new kicks, so much so that the beloved bookshelf quilt is now in second place in the category of Favorite Gifts Made By Mom. Meanwhile, I’m thinking that I might like to embroider a Starry Night scene, or a trilobyte, or maybe Stonehenge on my very own pair of Converse!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

How to Sew a Key Fob

I originally published this tutorial over at Crafting a Green World.

A key fob is a quick and easy stashbusting project that will come in super handy!

If you know someone who’s required to keep an ID and/or a key accessible at all times–a college student, say–then you know that it can actually be quite annoying. Nobody really wants to hang a lanyard around their neck every day of their lives, nor do they want to always be digging through their bag every time they have to swipe into a building or unlock their dorm room door or use their meal plan.

A key fob is a great solution for anyone who needs just a couple of things handy. It fits happily on one’s wrist when needed for ready access, and makes your stuff a LOT easier to find in a backpack or tote bag. And although you do have to purchase the hardware, the rest of it is simple to sew from scraps, making the key fob a great solution for the enthusiastically scrapbusting crafter, too!

Here’s how to make your own quick and easy and super handy key fob!

Materials

To sew a key fob, you will need:

• 4″x12″ piece of fabric. I like quilting cotton or similar for this. But if you used something heavy like denim, you might be able to get away with omitting the interfacing!
• 4″x12″ piece of interfacing. I really like Pellon 809 Decor-Bond for this project, although you could go a step up or down in weight and your key fob would still turn out nice. Because this is a stashbusting project, though, don’t despair if you don’t have any suitable interfacing! Dig through your fabric stash and look for anything on the stiffer side, like pre-washed Eco-fi felt or PUL, or even double up on thin interfacing.
• super glue. Use E6000, Gorilla Glue, or something similar. For some reason I have the WORST time keeping super glue nice in between uses, so I always try to buy the smallest package possible.
• 1″ key fob hardware. If you don’t want to spring for the special pliers, don’t think that you can just use your regular pliers–the grooves on conventional hardware pliers will scratch the snot out of your key fob hardware. Ask me how I know, ahem! If you do want to use regular pliers, pad both sides of the key fob hardware super well by putting a popsicle stick or scrap of denim fabric between the pliers and the hardware.

Step 1: Cut your fabric and interfacing to size.

As you can see in the image above, these key fobs are so quick and easy to sew that you might as well make multiples!

As for scraps, for this project I’m using a scrap that once belonged to a button-down shirt, a scrap that once belonged to a tablecloth, and a bit of stash.

Cut the fabric and the interfacing to 4″x12″.

Step 2: Iron the interfacing to the back of the fabric.

Hmm, I don’t know if my cuts are looking perfectly precise there. That plaid, especially, was a little more loosely-woven than I really wanted, but it was exactly the right colorway. Oh, well–the folding will fix it!

Step 3: Fold the fabric into quarters, lengthwise.

The easiest way to do this is to first fold the fabric in half, lengthwise, and iron well to crease it. Then fold each side in to meet the middle crease, and again iron to crease it.

The key fob is going to feel very thick at this point, and won’t want to hold all those creases, so clip it well.

Step 4: Edge-stitch around all sides.

Can y’all see the mistake that I made on all three of these key fobs?

ARGH!

I edge-stitched around all the raw edges of my key fob, but for some reason–forgetfulness? Distracted by an exciting part in my Fourth Wing audiobook?–I neglected to stitch down that fourth side, the folded side.

I’m so irritated at myself, but these key fobs are finished and gone to their college student recipients by now, and the good news is that there’s no way on earth that any of those teenagers are going to notice the absence of that one stitch line that they didn’t even know was supposed to be there. I fear that over time that fold will lose its crispness, though, especially at the middle where it will rub against the wearer’s wrist.

Ugh, this mistake will haunt me until the day I die.

Don’t be like me–edge-stitch ALL THE WAY AROUND your key fob! Depending on your machine, you may have to increase your needle size or stitch length to handle the bulk, but it should nevertheless be sewable for any home machine.

Step 5: Attach the key fob hardware.

The very first time I made key fobs, I excitedly put them in one of my kid's college care packages to give away to her friends, and over the proceeding semester, I was MORTIFIED to hear from them that one by one, their key fobs had fallen apart! College students are hard on their stuff, and the prongs simply could not hold the weight long-term.

Another failure to take to my grave!

I’ve seen a suggestion to use a seam ripper to poke little holes in the fabric that let the prongs dig in deeper, but just between us, I’ve had no more problems with my key fobs detaching after I started gluing the dang things.

So, fold the key fob fabric in half so that the short edges are together. I stitch them together because now I am the most paranoid key fob crafter, but tbh you probably don’t need to.

Run a thin line of super glue along the short edge. YOUR key fobs won’t be going anywhere!

Follow the directions on the key fob hardware to attach it. Usually, this will require you to set the fabric edges together inside the hardware, then use pliers (don’t forget to pad them if they’ve got grooves!) to clamp the hardware around the edges. Pay attention that the prongs are piercing the fabric, not just folding against it–I’ve found that tugging on the fabric as I clamp it helps with this–and that the hardware is lined up well with the fabric. With 1″ hardware and fabric folded down to 1″ wide, it should be a perfect fit!

Set the key fobs aside for the super glue to cure, then they’re ready to use.

Y’all, tell me honestly: in the above image, the missing edge-stitching is all you can see, isn’t it?!?

ARGH!!!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

This Is How I Keep My Wire-Bound Notebooks From Falling Apart

I originally published this tutorial over at Crafting a Green World.

Tired of the pages falling out of your wire-bound notebook? To fix it, you literally just need yarn. Or embroidery floss. Or twine.

Heck, even a shoelace would work!

Your spiral-bound notebooks are fine. The specific kind of notebook that I’m talking about here is the kind that uses what’s called twin loop wire binding. That’s the most common kind of DIY binding that handmade scrapbooks and journals use (see: my beloved Zutter Bind-It-All!), and if you don’t want to learn full-on bookbinding, it’s genuinely a really solid choice for a home-bound book.

This is what it looks like when the notebook starts falling apart. All those gaps between the wire loops, ugh!

… except for the part where the pages begin to slowly but steadily fall out of your cherished home-bound book, until one day you’re left with some bent wire and lots of loose-leaf paper. Twin loop wire-bound books are best suited for purposes that don’t involve a lot of wear and tear. A scrapbook, for instance, can be a great use for a wire-bound book, because once it’s complete, it’s generally handled infrequently, and gently. But those twin loops aren’t actually looped around each other, so the more use, the more handling, and the more carrying around and agitation and just plain life that a twin loop wire-bound book gets, the more the twin loops will work themselves apart, and the more the pages will start to work their way out of the binding.

It’s so frustrating!

Fortunately, the fix is SUPER easy. I can nearly guarantee you have something that will work for this fix, and that it will only take you a few minutes to complete. And then I can absolutely guarantee that your twin loop wire-bound notebook will never trouble you in this way again!

Materials

For this project, you will need:

• something you can thread between the loops. The material has to be thin enough to be threaded through the narrow side of the twin loop binding, but otherwise, anything works. This project works with yarn, ribbon, shoelaces, twine, strips of fabric, and embroidery floss. Heavy duty upholstery thread also works, although your typical polyester thread is too breakable.
• (optional) plastic tapestry needle. These generally have an eye wide enough to handle any of these materials. But you can do without it if you’re fairly dextrous.

Step 1: Tie a knot at one end of the binding.

Each end of the wire binding will end in a straight bit where the binding was cut to fit the notebook. Don’t tie your knot there, since it can slip off. Instead, tie a knot around the first loop. It doesn’t matter if it’s a wide loop or a narrow loop; either size will keep the knot in place.

Step 2: Wrap the yarn around every individual loop.

You can do this a couple of different ways, depending on whether or not you think you’ll ever want to disassemble this notebook.

If you know you’ll never want to take your notebook apart, tie a half-hitch around every loop you pass. It’s easy and looks tidy, and your binding will stay put forever!

However, the notebook I’m working on in these photos is my national parks passport stamp book. Sometimes I like to carry my whole book around, but sometimes I like to travel super lightly. For instance, did you know that there are something like THIRTEEN national park sites in New York City alone?!? If I’m flying carry-on only to NYC, then traveling via public transit and on foot across the length and breadth of Manhattan, I am NOT lugging that entire giant passport book every step I take. Instead, I open up the binding, remove the pages I need, and hop on my plane! So I don’t want to tie a knot I’d have to untie around every individual loop every time I want to unbind it.

So if you think you might want to unbind your book at some point, instead of a half-hitch, just loop your yarn twice around every individual wire loop. It looks maybe 2% less tidy and polished, but it keeps the binding just as secure, and when you want to unbind the book, you can snip the yarn near one of the knots, or untie the knot, and easily unthread the whole binding.

Your book is now perfect! This technique also keeps the notebook’s pages looking a lot nicer, because it’s hard on the pages to be constantly half-falling out of their binding. This is also an especially good fix for a child’s notebook, since kids tend to be a lot harder on their stuff and get a lot more frustrated when something breaks.

Not that I don’t get Big Feelings when it comes to my national parks passport stamp book, ahem. I only have 399 more stamps to go!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Here's How To Embellish a Hoodie with Fabric Applique

I originally published this tutorial over at Crafting a Green World.

Fabric applique is a popular way to embellish sweatshirts and hoodies. Here’s how to do it!

One of my favorite things about sending a kid off to college is adopting their roommates into my circle of people whom I sew for. I love to sew, but I do not personally need an infinite, always-replenishing supply of sewn goods, so it’s a win-win!

Or, in the case of my kid and her two roommates, each of whom I embellished a hoodie with their school’s name in their class colors, a win-win-win-win!

Embellishing a hoodie or sweatshirt with fabric applique can be a fussy project, requiring careful cutting and precise stitching, but otherwise it’s beginner-friendly. If you can sew a straight stitch and a zigzag and you’re feeling especially patient, you can do this!

Here’s how:

Materials

To embellish a hoodie with a fabric applique, you will need:

• sweatshirt or hoodie. Use one you already own, or do what I did and scour your favorite thrift shop over the course of a few weeks until the perfect hoodie reveals itself to you.
• fabric scraps. This is a terrific scrapbusting project, so don’t be afraid to use even your smallest bits.
• lightweight double-sided fusible interfacing. Pellon and Heat n Bond both make essentially identical versions of this.
• design tools. For designing and sizing the letters, you could use stencils or go digital with something like Canva, Photoshop, or Cricut Design Space.
• cutting tools. You’ll need scissors to cut by hand or you can use a cutting tool like Cricut or Sizzix.

Step 1: Design the applique.

I knew what design I wanted for these hoodies, but I wasn’t sure about sizing, so I went old-school and cut out paper templates of the largest features of my design, then placed and arranged them and adjusted them on the hoodies until I found a size and placement that I liked. For this project, the fabric squares that the individual letters will be appliqued to will each be 3″.

After you’ve got your sizing, you can figure out and create templates for your specific fabric applique design. I created mine in Cricut Design Space, picking the font I wanted and then fiddling with each individual letter until it was the exact size I wanted it to be. But you could also do this by hand using paper templates, or by working with a stencil set. There are so many design options!

Step 2: Cut the fabric applique pieces.

I put my Cricut to work for me again on this step, although you could also cut your fabric applique pieces by hand or use a die-cutter.

Whatever method you use, cut one of each fabric applique piece that you’ll need, and cut one of each piece out of lightweight double-sided fusible interfacing, as well. If you cut interfacing with the Cricut, you’ll want to tape it to the mat at the corners, because it doesn’t like to stick to the mat.

If you’re doing something with a lot of prints and fabric combinations, like my applique letters on an applique background, mock up your appliques after you’ve cut them out but before you iron and sew them, just to make sure that everything is the way you like it. I feel like I should have separated the letters by color better on my own project, but I ultimately decided that I didn’t care enough to cut out new letters, lol. But at least by doing a mock-up I had the option!

Step 3: Fuse and stitch any applique pieces together.

My particular project requires that I applique letters to square backgrounds, then applique those squares to the hoodies.

The first step, then, is to get those letters onto their backgrounds! If you, as well, have applique pieces that overlap, do as much of that as possible before you applique them onto your hoodie.

For my project, I ironed each letter to its square, with the interfacing piece I’d cut to match sandwiched in the middle, then I edge-stitched around all raw edges. A zigzag is by far the best stitch to use when attaching fabric applique pieces, but zigzag gets tricky as the applique pieces get smaller, so ultimately I decided to go with just a straight stitch for this project. It will absolutely result in the odd loose thread from those raw edges, but I think that’s an acceptable look for this particular project.

Step 4: Fuse and stitch the applique to the hoodie.

Take all the time you need to place the appliques onto the hoodie exactly where you want them. For me, this meant placing my appliques, then literally leaving it all sitting there until my partner, who’s a graphic designer, could get home from work and double-check them. When it was his turn, he even got out the tape measure to make sure everything was centered and perfect!

When you’re confident that your appliques are perfectly situated, iron them to the hoodie. I was happily ironing away, listening to a podcast, when I suddenly stopped in confusion, stymied about why on earth my appliques weren’t fusing to the hoodie. Was the thrifted hoodie made of some weird fabric that wouldn’t let the fusible interfacing adhere? Yeah, no… I’d actually just forgotten to put the fusible interfacing pieces between the applique and the hoodie.

So don’t forget to do that!

When everything is perfect, stitch these larger appliques to the hoodie exactly the way you stitched any smaller pieces. These 3″ squares would have done great with a zigzag stitch, but I decided it would match better if I used the same straight stitch I’d used on the smaller pieces. I also purposely used thread that wouldn’t blend in with most of the pieces, to highlight the patchwork look.

The finished hoodies turned out just the way I wanted! I love the patchwork look, and my child’s class color represented in a variety of prints. The kid and her buddies had matching, personalized merch to keep them warm on campus this autumn, and in the Spring semester, a younger student joined the friend group, so I got to make another appliqued hoodie in red!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!