Wednesday 30 January 2013

Card Making Projects (and other paper crafts)

Mother Day Card Project
Mother Day Card Projetc
So I have decided to make some Card Making and other paper craft projects. I want to make these accessible to all levels of card makers. Beginners should find I am working very much at their level and more experienced paper crafters may just see a few ideas or techniques they haven't come accross before.

In no way do I think I am a "good" paper crafter, in fact, after years and years of designing papers, I've only actually done a minimal amount of actual making. Having said that I often have ideas in my head when I've been creating the designs and it is a few of these ideas I'm going to try and do on video.

Card Making Video Project
Card Making Video Project
The first project I have done is a simple mothers day card. I've obviously used both a template and some of the papers off Free Craft Downloads although I have altered them slightly so I didn't have to do lots of manual cutting and pasting. These altered sheets are available on Free Craft Downloads on the projects page. This mothers day card is vert straight forward but I am certain many of the clever crafters who visit the site will be able to see what I have done and then improve on it. After all that is a big part of crafting, taking what someone else has done and adding your own personal twist.

I hope you enjoy this project and the future ones. They will only be occational additions to our site but hopefully, after a year or so, we will have built up a nice library of them.

Sunday 20 January 2013

Free Stencils to Downloads

This week we have had a bit of a stencil frenzy with two completely different uses for stencils. As normal these stencils will be completely free to download and print at home.

Free 3 and 4 inch Stencil Patterns

Free Letter Stencils to download
Letter Stencils 
These free 3 inch and 4 inch stencil templates are a bit different from our normal downloads. Normally we do free  card making, scrapbooking, glass painting and cross stitch downloads etc. With these stencil downloads we have no idea how people are going to use them, but we are very sure that people with find them really useful in a wide range of situations. Print them onto card and cit out  to use in sponging and other craft work.
We'd really like to hear how people are using them, so, if you use them please do let us know and send a pic if possible.

3 and 4 inch Stencil Templates



Relative Card Stencils

Free Relative Card Stencils to download and print
Relative  Card Stencils
The second type of stencil downloads we have done are these relative card stencils. This is just the begining of what we intend to be a much larger set. At the moment we have cards available  for close relatives such as Mum, Dad, Grandad, Nan, Sister, Brother, Aunty, Uncle and Cousin.  The cards are available in three different sizes all which are "long folded", the are A4, A5 and 10x7. Our idea for these cards is that you cut out the letters and then put a sheets (coloured?) behind it. I'm sure our users over on Free Craft Downloads will  come up with lots more ideas.

We have put fold marks on these papers so you will know where the middle is, plus they have a very light border all rounds, so if you print the A5 card onto an A4 sheet of card you will know where to cut.

Relatives: Card Stencils


Monday 14 January 2013

New Music and Sport Papers Topic page.

It's the bane of my life that we have all these great papers for people to download for free,  but helping them find the one they need almost an impossible task. Things have slowly improved since we started the site, the site map lists just about everything on the site by section, the Special Dates and Special Events section help people find free papers for those important days and we are still working on an index for the papers.

Sailing Cross Stitch Chart      


In addition to these we are adding TOPIC PAGES which will list all (or all we can find) papers we have on a given topic. The first two topics we have covered are Music and Sports.

Free Sports papers.

Free Football Papers
Australian Football
The Sports topic page list all the papers we have covering different sports, all the obvious sports are there: football, Cricket, fishing, horse riding, sailing, tennis, golf etc and also some of the not so obvious: Skateboarding, bowling, Clay Pidgin shooting, Pool etc.

We list papers from all over the site so as well as the popular free Backing papers and inserts we also list the digi stamps, cross stitch charts and glass painting designs when they are available.

Free Sports papers.


Free Music Papers.

Image of free guitar decoupage
Brewster Guitar
Like the sports topic, the music topic page is also very diverse. One set of papers and decpoupage show a string quartet which another shows Yowser doing some mixing on the decks. We also have free papers showing Carol Singers, Brass and String instruments, treble clefs, Brewster on the guitar and much more. I should hope that, if you want to make a music based greeting card or other paper craft projects, you will be able to find some suitable free papers in this section.
Free Music Papers.

Free Music Downloads for Card Making
Treble Clef Papers
We will be continuing to add to these "Topic sections" over the coming months. The next two sections will focus on our free floral/flower papers and our Dance papers. As normal, after that, we are open to any suggestions you may have.

Sunday 13 January 2013

Free Dance Themed Craft Papers

Rock and Roll Dancers, Free Papers.
Rock and Roll Dancers
As if starting one new section wasn't enough this week, we have started a second one which will feature are free papers related to the theme of Dance. We do already have some free backing papers, inserts, tags, labels etc on the site with dance designs and we will bring these together in this new section alongside a lot of brand new designs. We have already made a start on this section  by uploading 2 new sets of papers for you to download. Set 1 is a female ballet set featuring women ballet dances on all of our normal papers. The second set is a Rock and Roll one so you couldn't really get two sets which were more different! As normal the papers are freely downloadable and printable. They can be used not only in card making but also in other paper crafts.

Female Ballet Dancers
Female Ballet Dancers: Free Papers
In the coming weeks will will be producing a lot more Dance themed papers including Male Ballet, Pairs, Ballet, Flamenco, Indian Dancing, "Pop" Dancing and Latin Dancning just to name a few.

As normal with our papers we'd love to hear from you if you have any other suggests. We can be contact via email at admin@freecraftdownloads.co.uk.

Backing Papers: Inserts and Tags Dance Section

Backing Papers: Inserts and Tags Dance Section: Female Ballet Dancing

Backing Papers: Inserts and Tags Dance Section: Rock and Roll Dancing


Card making papers for relatives

Free Craft Downloads: New Relatives Section

Daughter Craft Paper
So a new year brings a new section for the site, "Relatives".  It's actually quite an obvious section for us to have. We have always tried to offer a wide range of basic papers which are free to download and useful to both card makers and other paper crafters. Although obvious it took a suggestion by one of the sites users to prompt us to make this a section.

We already have some papers on the site for relatives, particular papers to download for fathers day, mother day etc. However in this new section we will be widening the range of relative papers significantly to include some obvious but less widely covered relation ships.

Female relative card making papers.

Daughter Craft Paper
The first few weeks will be spent up loading papers for female relatives and this will cover:
Aunt, Auntie, Aunty, Cousin (female), Daughter, Gran, Grandma, Mom, Mum, Mummy, My Partner (Female), My Wife, Nan, Nanny, Niece, Sister, Mother-in-Law, Sister-in-Law, My Girlfriend, My Fiancée, Step Sister, Step Mother, Step Daughter, Daughter-in-Law and Great Aunt.

This should make a good start for the new section. Each of the set will contain our normal papers: Backing Papers, Tags and Labels, Page Curls, Landscape Papers and our 12 types of insert sheets.

These papers should be great for making birthday cards as well as cards for other special days such as fathers day and mothers day. All of the papers will be fully downloadable and printable so you can use them right away or save them on your computer to use later.

We have already made a start on this new section which you can find here:

Male Relative Card Making Papers.

Daughter craft paperOnce we have a reasonable number of sections for female relatives we will start uploading the same for male relatives. These will include:
Uncle, Cousin (male), Son, Grandpa, Dad, Daddy, My Partner (male), My Husband, Hubby,Gramps, Nephew, Brother,Father-in-Law,Brother-in-Law, My Boyfriend, My Fiancé, Step Brother, Step Father, Step Dad, Step Son, Son-in-Law and Great Uncle.

As with all our free papers we are open to any suggestion you may have for these sections. Birthday cards for relatives are probably the most common greetings cards (after Christmas Cards) so we would like to have as many different free papers in this section as possible.
There will be more new sections on Free Craft Downloads over the new couple of weeks so please look out for those!