Patchwork card with the Birds of a Feather March kit!

I am so excited to have shared my first Birds of a Feather tutorial! So I decided to share it with all my blog readers here. I saw this technique a few months back at Two Peas and had to give it a try. So here we go!

(1) Gather your supplies: several different papers, a sheet of letter size cardstock, cardstock trimmed and folded to standard greeting card size (5.5" x 4.25"), an adhesive runner, a trimmer and embellishments.

(2) Cut a total of 17 1/2" wide, 12" long strips from your various papers.

(3) Adhere your strips side-by-side vertically along your sheet of letter-size cardstock. Be sure to separate and space out patterns of like color and pattern.

(4) Trim 1/2" strips from your patterned-paper covered cardstock perpendicular to the strips you just adhered to that cardstock.

(5) Adhere the checked strips to your greeting card base. Stagger and flip your strips so that the same patterned block is not adjacent to another block of the same pattern. Once you're finished, you should have a bunch of leftover checked strips so put those aside for use on another project or make a second card! (Note: In these photos, you can see that my squares don't line up perfectly. I purposely cut my strips around 1/2" wide and not exactly 1/2" wide. I did this to give my card a more "homespun" look. Of course, you will have more of an exact, clean grid if you cut all your strips to exactly a 1/2" wide. It all depends on the look you want.)

(6) Trim off the overhanging strip pieces from your card.

(7) Embellish your card and add your sentiment. I prefer to keep the embellishing minimal on this type of card because the background is very busy.

(8) Pick a recipient of your finished card!

 

Thanks for checking out my tutorial! I hope you'll find it useful for creating a quick card that looks like it takes forever to create and it's a great way to use up long, thin scraps of paper!