April and May always seem to feel like really busy months.  In addition to Easter and two sets of bank holidays it is also my mum and brother’s birthday’s.  So I am often left frantically trying to combine fitting in lots of making and gardening in between family time and visits with friends!

Homemade cards using lino printed paper and wallpaper

Here are the cards I made for my mum and brother, made just in time and posted first class!  Often I think cards for men can be difficult – if they aren’t into fishing and fast cars that is.  My bro writes music, but there are only so many times you can stick a picture of a guitar on a card before it gets predictable!  So this year I took inspiration from a simple Spirograph pattern and made a linocut especially for this card.  I printed a few extra sheets of paper while I was at it so that should do a few more cards besides this one!

Playing around with ribbons and papers

You can see I had fun trying out different mixes of paper and ribbons to find the right layout.

Lino printed Spirograph card with stripy ribbon

Vintage lady wallpaper card with embellishments

It was really the same principle for this card I made for my mum – I love this vintage lady print wallpaper from Next.  The colours are neutral but I tried to pep them up a bit with this green ribbon.  The sentiment is cut from an old card (which was very pink, but actually went perfectly once cut out!) and the birds and butterflies were a gift from my sister-in-law (from John Lewis).  Perfect finishing touches!

I’m resolving to start planning ahead a bit more when it comes to this time of year in the future, but then again I’ll probably forget before next year…