– When you make handcrafted jewellery there’s a certain amount of paper crafts involved in the process: you need labels, business cards, earring and necklace cards, background papers for photographing your jewellery (paper is much better than fabric as a background because it doesn’t collect dust, animal hairs or fluff can will look bad on a blown up image), thank you notes, etc.

Some people do everything on the computer (or have it done for them) and print it out, others like to use stamps, pattern paper and several handmade techniques to personalize their labels and cards. I use a mix of both. I created my logo and made the base layouts for my labels and cards but then I use pattern or coloured paper as a background.

My point is that I had already accumulated a certain amount of paper and materials and since I like paper crafts, I had fun this summer making some greeting cards.

It was so much fun, in fact, that I felt I needed to come up with a decent excuse to be able to keep making cards. I came up with an interesting idea that seemed absolutely obvious to me – making decorated earring cards.

I looked around on the internet thinking that it was so obvious that someone must have done it first and maybe it would save me time to see how other people had solved some of the technical aspects. I did find some earring greeting cards but they all featured the earrings on the front of the card. It’s a perfectly fine idea but I wanted the earrings on the inside so that they’re protected by the card itself and also to make them a surprise.

In the end this is what I came up with:

The outside is a typical 5″ square greeting card but it you can flip it inside out and display the earrings instead.

The butterfly digi stamp comes from Shery K Designs. She has truly wonderful free digi stamps.

I colored the stamp with watercolor pencils and used a decorated glitter design cardstock for the background.

Inside I used the same background paper and frame but left the center blank for the earrings. I made a little folded tab to hang the earrings that I glued onto the white cardstock.

The cardstock layers make the card pretty sturdy so the weight of the earrings isn’t a problem.

I’m pretty happy with the result and now I can make all sorts of variations. The frame can be square, round, oval, etc, and I can’t wait to try out different styles.

I may have to make a custom envelope, though, because of the card’s thickness.