Handmade Business Cards!

After Ashley of the lovely 31 Experiment Blog (http://31experiment.blogspot.com/) posted pictures of handmade business cards - I got inspired! Here are a few more handmade designs I found picking through Flickr.

These are from tortiselovesthehare, and it looks like (from one of the comments left) that the 'ribbon' is actually the tape from a cassett tape! How adorable!

These were designed by Storykraft Kreative for Madame Pompadour and I LOVE how elegant and dark they are! Definitely more for the graphically inclined (not myself!) but I'm on the look out for some nice scrapbook filigree cutouts like those!

Above are from subdued7 - and exactly what I was thinking of when I wanted to use decorative scissors! I love the different styles of paper and how unique the cards appear - totally simple and possible to do for the paper-craft challenged folks like me!

Etruzey was nice enough to list the 'ingredients' for these striking cards: An old italian newspaper, Adobe Illustrator, a printer, fingers, tape and a black pen. A great way to recycle newspapers!

Jingman made these AMAZING 3d business cards!! A lofty goal for those who don't mind spending a lot of time on each card :) These would be great to use for 'special' recipients like shops and newspapers/magazines.

Another pop-up type card designed by mpFAH for one of my favorite etsy sellers - BigMamaNebraska! I love how they look when folded over (far right card).

Soooo - after seeing many beautiful ideas I finally started playing around with my own! Now they are no where near as nice as the above but I think I'm off to a good start - plus, I'm happy to finally have anything I can include with packages or give out! I actually had a student ask me about my earrings yesterday and didn't have a card to give to had to ask her for a pen and paper to write it down lol. Not very professional looking!

First - my workspace!

Now - some of my designs. YES I know I'm not great at stamping, YES I know many are off-centered, smudged, and generally not perfect. I like that! The beauty of handmade :) My favorite is the corset prototype - I definitely need to get a small hole punch and these would only go to 'the super important' places like magazines/newspapers.

First, the front:

A few other designs I made up:

For most of these the back has the 4 corners stamped with the small filigree and my etsy shop address written in silver metallic pen in the middle.

I LOVE doing these and it's fun to be able to make each one different (if I want to!). The simple black stamped ones take about 3 minutes each (including cutting time!) while the corset took about 10 minutes. I spent $17 on paper, ink, stamps and the pen - and I'm assuming I can make 100's of these beauties with only having to purchase more paper along the way.

Loves it!