More ALSB, but with cards

Yesterday I completed ALSB’ing my Club Stamp kit for January, “Random Doorways,” only I decided to make them into cards rather than layouts. (Actually got to feeling a little guilty that I hadn’t made any Operation Write Home cards for the past couple of months while I was focusing on preparing to scrapbook my heart out…)  I thought I’d show more details of how I did it, since it’s a great thing to do to fairly quickly use up a Club Stamp kit, but also to show more details to our Operation Write Home friends a great technique they can use with their own materials.

For this project, I selected for the directions to use the Assembly Line directions for the “Just Dandy” kit that Club Scrap put out in July, 2011. (CLICK HERE to see/download those directions.)

“Random Doorways” Club Stamp kit ready for ALSB (Assembly Line) card-making. Here, 6 sheets of 8.5″x11″ are earmarked for card bases; and scored down the middle. [Well, actually 7 are pictured here. One of the teals was a mistake, so it was taken out of that pile and put in the other one below…)

Each Club Stamp kit comes with 12 sheets of Club Scrap’s exclusive heavy-weight cardstock; they’re all in the 8.5″ x 11″ size (in contrast to the coordinating Senior and Junior kits). That makes this club particularly attractive to card-makers, because these kits are just ready-to-go for making A-2 sized cards. They contain 2 sheets of a print (designed to coordinate with that month’s theme in the  Senior and Junior kits), plus 10 sheets of solids using matching colors of the color palette for that month.

So, substituting the “Random Doorways” sheets of cardstock for the “Just Dandy” ones in the directions, I otherwise just followed the directions to come up with 12 finished cards.

Random Doorways: The first 6 sheets of cardstock, now cut, scored, and folded into 12 card bases.

According to those directions, 6 sheets of cardstock were needed to designate for the card bases, so that was the first step. Above, you see the ones I chose from the Random doorways collection. Then I scored and cut them.

(Tip: Tricia Morris, co-founder of Club Scrap and “Assembly Line” directions Queen, suggested when cutting and scoring cardstock for card bases, it saves a whole step by scoring a sheet first, and THEN cutting it in half–that way you only have to make one scoring pass!)

Then all 12 card bases are folded and burnished along the score lines, and set aside.

Random Doorways: remaining 6 sheets of cardstock in the kit will be used for card panels.

The remaining 6 sheets of cardstock in the Random Doorways kit are earmarked for trimming into various panels to be decorated and nested and/or mounted on top of the bases. I had printed out the original directions, and crossed out the “Just Dandy” paper designations and replaced them with the papers I selected from this “Random Doorways” collection.

Here’s what the “puddle” of cut-up panel pieces look like, once each of the 6 sheets is cut up according to the cutting directions:

Random Doorways: 6 panel sheets now cut up according to the cutting instructions; ready for placement

Now with all pieces cut and ready to assemble, I laid them all out according to the suggested diagrams in the directions:

Random Doorways: all pieces cut and laid out according to instruction diagrams. Ready to customize!

Now all that remains is–for me!–the most time-consuming part of the project; doing the actual decorating of the cards!

Since I had all the unmounted rubber stamps for this Random Doorways collection, I decided to focus on utilizing those for this particular cards, and went to work. I also used pieces of leftover ribbon and other embellishments from the Random Doorways Senior and Junior kits.

Here are the final cards, ready to be prepped for shipping to Operation Write Home:

Random Doorways: the final decorated 12 cards

Okay, the deed is done! And now I feel better that can start putting some numbers into my statistics block for accomplishments for 2013. Today I think I’ll make a few more OWH cards using up old stash papers; just to get the numbers up!

I’m saving the “Completed pages” efforts for Club Scrap’s “Professional Scrapbookers League” (PSL) challenge, which will begin in about a week… then those zeroes will begin to disappear…

With this post, stats:	This post	January, 2013	Cumulative 2013
ALSB pages	0	96	96
Completed pages	0	0	0
OWH Cards, CS	12	12	12
OWH Cards, non-CS	0	0	0
Projects	0	1	1

Wondering if I’ll have any time to squeeze in maybe a project per month? That’s ambitious; it will be tight, especially during PSL…projects just might have to wait…