Today I am review the Sugar Rush card making kit from Basic Grey, as well as a few of the accessories I used to put it together. I wanted to put together some cards for Valentine’s Day, and I’ve wanted to try one of these kits for a while, so it seemed like the perfect time. I have to admit, I’m a holiday color traditionalist, so this is a departure for me, but it was a fun one.
First, the basics:
The kit comes with enough cardstock, chipboard, and rub-ons to make 8 cards. Each card is a different design and size. The kit comes with an envelope for each card.
The supplies:
Although they don’t mention this on the package, this kit also requires an adhesive and a black journaling pen or fine-tipped marker. They also recommend “coordinating colors of dye-based inks” for coloring the edges of things, but I decided to skip those. I’ve noticed that some of the other Basic Grey Card Kits also recommend a white pen, so take a good look at the cover of the package before you buy.
My choices for supplies were a Stampin’ Up! Basic Black marker, a Uni-ball Signo white pen also from Stampin’ Up!, Memory Book Glue Dots, a Zig 2-way Glue Pen, and a Mono Adhesive runner.
Also, because a lot of the pieces in the kit come in a sheet, when you take them out you get these little hangers-on:
I like to use nail scissors for these, because the rounded blades let me cut off the little bit without risking cutting into the paper.
My process:
The instructions walk you step by step though the process of making each card. The card itself is pre-cut and pre-scored. The embellishments are either punched out of a pre-cut sheet of card stock, in a pre-punched and pre-printed sheet of adhesive cardstock, or a rub-on. Each element of the cardstock and chipboard labeled with the number of the card that it is used on. Each sheet also includes some extra embellishments. You can see everything I had left here (These are 12×12 sheets):
The adhesive that comes on the chipboard is not terribly strong, especailly for such heavy pieces. I used a combination of Memory Book Glue Dots (because they don’t add any height) for the larger pieces, and the Mono Adhesive runner for the smaller bits. For the cardstock pieces I mostly used the Mono runner. However, there are a few smaller pieces that the Mono is just too large and awkward for, letters, for instance. In that case…
The Zip Two-Way glue roller is my best friend. I bought it when we first got a Cricut, to attach the narrow letters I often had trouble attaching to anything. It’s got a tip about the size of a medium point ballpoint pen.
The process generates a fair amount of garbage, mostly little bits of paper, so keep a garbage can or sack at your workspace to speed the clean up.
The cards:
Because these are non-traditional sizes and have chipboard on them they are difficult to mail, so save these for personal delivery. The kit comes with a custom-sized envelope for each card.
The cards turned out nicely. I took a few shortcuts, such as not putting anything in interiors of the cards, drawing the dashed black lines, or inking the edges, so know that if you do those things you’ll probably need at least 2 hours.
The kit does make an enormous amount of decisions for you, but nothing says that you have to use the included ingredients in the suggested ways. The patterns from Basic Grey’s Sugar Rush paper line, and the patterns on the kit components correspond to the pattern sizes on their 12×12 papers, so you can blend the two easily.
In the end it wasn’t necessarily the most creative card making session of my life, but it was fast, and it was fun.
The Product Review: Sugar Rush Card Kit by FasterCraft, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
