Crafting Visual Narratives: Gifts with a Personal Touch

In our very digital world, physical items tend to get overlooked. But what would you rather receive, a thoughtfully hand-crafted card or just digital card? Personally, I love to receive hand-made items because I know that time and effort went into it making it more meaningful to me.

Some people can point out that you get get more creative and creative amazing design digitally, and I can't argue with that because most of what I do is digital, but I want to show a little light on the physical things. You can create an immense amount of designs with physical items. Let me introduce you to some of my favorites!

The first one I'm going to mention is probably the most obvious on, drawing. I'm sure most of you have at some point in your life drawn a card for somenone. And I know that many will say, "but I'm not good at drawing" but this is absolutley not the only option that you have. You can also use a combination of paper, glue, tape, and other small elements to create a collage style card. There are a lot of ways you could go with this. I'll include an example at the end of each method I will be listing here.

The next method is including crochet, knitted, or sewed items into you card. Even with these skills (especially crocheting) being revived recently, they still add a very beautiful and personal touch to a card especially to those who enjoy handmade elements. These add a beautiful texture as well as an intricate pattern that is often scanned and in used in digital designs as well. Another thing in this same "genre" is embroidering. There are plenty of free templates online to help you make a beautiful embroidered card or you can create a design yourself, but this is a fairly easy technique to learn that creates very stunning results.

This next method is one of my personal favorites. It is a method called quilling. If you were to Google the definition of this you would receive this definition: "a type of ornamental craftwork involving the shaping of paper, fabric, or glass into delicate pleats or folds," and what made me chuckle a little was the sentence in which the word as used: "Betty finds quilling a very relaxing hobby." When I craft with this technique, I only work with paper, but I definitely find it a relaxing hobby. I'm not sure what it is about it, but the whole process is very soothing and the end result is always very interesting.

The last method is one I'm sure most people have heard about and that is origami.