Zebra Buddies Lesson 1

Welcome, Zebra Buddies!! I hope you've seen the preview or warm-up post to this first official one; if not, pls be sure to go back and take a peek.

(Sorry, but it's a bit hard for me to type, so I use abbrev. I hope they all make sense.)

Before we begin this lesson, I'd like to mention past experience and supplies. I intend to write these lessons for the benefit of all, even though everyone has a different level of experience and owns different supplies. I quite possibly might have different tools (toys) than you do but don't let that dissuade you. I will try to make most of the ideas within reach for as many of us as possible, giving alternate ideas when I can. You saw examples of this in the first post (preview or warm-up one.)

On to supplies. As I've been saying, you really don't need lots of fancy, expensive machines to make great cards for kiddos. Sure, they can be nice to have, but not all of us have access to them, so I will do all I can to help you use what YOU have on hand or at least, access to.

Let's briefly mention some of the basic supplies that I am assuming you probably have on hand: scissors; ruler; paper (possibly colored paper, too); cardstock (CS to me) hopefully in white and colors; some adhesive; something to color with like markers, colored pencils, watercolors, etc; and stickers. There are probably a few more items on here but you get the idea, BASIC. Now, these are the items that would be very nice to have: at least some rubber stamps and inks, embellishments such as ribbon, brads (paper fasteners), buttons, designer or patterned papers (DP to me), and various other crafting supplies. You may have more or less, but I will try to make this work for everyone!

In the interest of being 'green,' (No, I did NOT turn into Kermit the frog) I have used scrap supplies in the photos. You (and I) will use cardstock (CS) for making cards but I use paper in the photos. Also, I will not waste my kiddo stickers just to show you a lesson, so I have used stamps to represent stickers. You'll see. Thanks for understanding.

OK, so here we go! First, most all of us seem to start out with stickers or small stamps and we do this:

We put them all over the page in a random pattern. I think most everyone has done this; I know I have. There is nothing really 'wrong' with this, but perhaps we can find something we like even better.

So, next I decided to stamp (or 'sticker') onto a piece of yellow CS, like this:

(Note: I know the ball in the middle is not exactly centered but I didn't re-do it, since this is just scrap anyway and not a real card.)  Then, I stamped, "Happy Birthday" down in the corner. There may be some of you who still like the first one more bc it seems to have more going on. OK, but stick with me for just a bit more.

So, this it pretty plain and not very dressed up. I decided to add a blue strip under the yellow one, and it came out like this:

Now, I can't say I am thrilled with this result. I would like to see something more in the background, perhaps. "White space" is not always white, but it refers to blank space that is good bc it gives the eye a chance or a place to rest. In this case, it is white but not always. I could leave this as is; I could add small, and I mean tiny, dots of color to the background; or I could use my stars embossing folder to add those to the background. I'm sure there are other options, as well.

I'm going to close this lesson for now. I do apologize to those of you who found this to be a little long; usually they will not be. I just wanted to try to bring everyone up to speed so we would all start on the same page, as much as possible! Thank you all for stopping by; I look forward to seeing you here again soon!!