Complete Practical Book of Making Gift Cards and Scrapbooking : 360 Easy-to-Follow Projects and Techniques With 2300 Lavish Photographs

The complementary crafts of creative greetings cards and decorative scrapbooking have soared in popularity in recent years. Each offers the opportunity to create carefully tailored and highly personalized designs that celebrate life's special events, and to delight family and friends. This lavish practical reference book is a compendium of 350 inspirational ideas, craft techniques and fabulous designs shown in evocative photographs.An introduction to each craft details all the materials and equipment that are needed to get started. Easy techniques for making and decorating card and scrapbook page backgrounds follow, and there are tips on choosing design themes, putting colours and patterns together, and choosing embellishments to personalize each design. Hundreds of versatile craft techniques are featured such as papercraft, stamping, stencilling, paint techniques, modelling with air-drying clay, simple sewing and embroidery. There is a section that looks at getting the most from a digital camera and learning how to crop photographs for best effect.Make a greetings card to celebrate New Year, a cute and colourful fluffy rabbit for a first birthday, a traditional and festive Christmas card, or an opulent gilded card for a wedding anniversary. Create memorable scrapbooking pages to remember a child's birthday party, use treasured sepia-tinted photographs for a heritage display of a family wedding, and use embellishments and mementoes for a lasting impression of a special holiday abroad.Every technique and project is clearly explained in more than 2100 step-by-step photographs. With hundreds of fantastic ideas to suit all tastes and every occasion, this is the ultimate source book for all crafters. The easy-to-follow projects use simple and effective methods and materials that are ready to hand, while more advanced ideas stretch the more skilled crafter