How to: make jewelry cards

I'm quite proud of the new jewelry cards I mentioned in my recent post about my new branded packaging, so I thought I'd share how I made them.

Trying out different lengths of earring card

Considering the earring cards are so simple many hours actually went into designing them.

First of all I had to decide how much information to include on the cards and where to position it. Should I include the circles background? The grass logo? Both?

Should the name be centred? How close to the top of the card should it be? You get the idea!

I printed out cards in all variations so I could test them out with earrings on and compare how they looked.

Hole punch for the tiny holes in
the earring cards

This threw up a new issue: how long should the cards be? When testing out the different card designs I realised that my earrings vary a lot in length, from studs to several inches long. I searched on the internet for inspiration and to see what other people were doing for really long earrings but it seemed most people simply allowed the bottom part of the earring to hang off the card. After trying for a while to find one length that worked for all earrings I gave up and decided on 3 different lengths of card and worked out the measurements for them.

At this stage I realised that I could take a different approach and design the cards so that all earrings (except studs) would hang almost completely off the bottom of the card. I tested it out and loved it! The best part is that I can use the one size card for all earrings.

I had another palava trying to buy card the right thickness to print the cards on. Suffice to say the American system of labelling paper weight was far too complicated and not well enough documented for my British brain to comprehend! If it confuses you, too, check out this amazing page that finally explained it to me http://www.papermojo.com/paper_weight_conversion.html.

Anyway, believe it or not, the necklace card, despite being a more complex design, took far less time to make!

I needed a design that would require minimum time to make and minimum manual cutting but would still look professional.

Eventually I settled on this really simple, quick and easy design.

My 1 1/2 inch circle punch

1. Print long rectangles with the logo/information at the top





2. Use a large circle punch to take out both sides of the middle as shown.

3. Put a strip of double-sided tape on the back of the top and leave the backing on until you are ready to attach some jewelry to the card.



The necklace cards do take longer to make than the earring cards and it is tricky getting the 2 halves to line up exactly. It helps to print markers on the card to know exactly where to cut.

There are plenty of other good ways to make cards like this, if you make yours a different way feel free to share tips and links below :)

The finished cards