Back to Basics #4.1 'Z' card tutorial

Yesterday I shared my more expensive essentials - things that are great if you have them, but you really can manage without.

My guillotine is a handy bit of kit. Truth be told, I use it as much for covering my mistakes as I do for 'proper' crafting - more on that later.

A4 is the standard letter size here in the UK. I believe the US has a slightly different size, but if you don't bother with measurements, (like me) and fold your paper/card by halves, then this tutorial will work for you too.

I started with an A5 piece of card.

A5 is half a sheet of A4 - please don't ask why the numbers get bigger as the size is halved, I really don't know... but I'll find out.

I scored down the centre - for this particular card, a close-estimate is fine, as long as it's the same at the top and bottom (and in between, don't go getting clever and start wavy-folding).

Fold the card along the fold line.

You could stop here, of course. This makes a perfect base for a lovely card.

I didn't stop there.

Score the card in half again down the front.

Fold it back on itself.

This is where my guillotine comes into its own.

Chop the card into two - again, it's not important to measure it, just make sure the chop-line is exactly level.

The two pieces.

This is the difficult bit.

Don't worry, I'm not being patronising, I got it wrong the first few times and couldn't, for the life of me, figure out where I went wrong.

Stick the strip of folded card to the card blank. If you want to decorate the inside first, that's fine and probably easier (I keep forgetting to do that).

The long part of the strip adheres to the short, front part of the card. The short part of the strip adheres to the long part (effectively, the inside of the card).

You now have a shorter, but way more interesting card blank.

Now, I cheat. I buy strips of bling, stickers, and all sorts of interesting things to stick on the cards, but I shop craftily. I buy Christmas stickers just after Christmas, Easter themes just after Easter and whenever I spot a bargain, I grab it. Yes, it means I have stock-piles of stuff out of season, but it also means I can cut costs when the seasons roll around again - And I've noticed they tend to do that, at least once a year ;)

I bought a few strips of Happy Birthday stickers (gold and silver) and the butterflies weren't even meant for crafting, they're for kids.

I cut up a couple of my used-cards from my stash and stuck everything onto the card.

It's not spectacular, but it'll make do in a pinch.

Here's one of my earlier efforts.

The method commonly known as 'chuck everything at it' worked well, I think.

Happy Crafting!