| Yesterday, I showed how you could design a label to be an invitation and I promised that I would share how to make another style of unique invitations today.
First, I need to explain what Artist Trading Cards (ATC) are. Artist Trading Cards are miniature works of art that are traded between artists or a variation of ATC called Art Cards, Editions and Originals (ACEO) are sold by artists. Artist Trading Cards are about the same size as baseball trading cards (2-1/2 inches by 3-1/2 inches) and will fit into standard collector sleeves. You can use any type of paper as your base, most artists prefer to use card stock or a similarly heavy paper. You can design a card on the computer or draw it by hand using any thing you want. Colored pencils, markers, highlighters, watercolors, paints, makeup, dyes, pigments, nail polish, and many other things. You can also glue items onto your trading cards as long as the cards still can fit into collector sleeves. On January 19th, I made a simple bath salt and today, I’m going to make the same recipe only with Raspberry Fragrance Oil. Collect needed items. Salt, last time I used Dead Sea Salt, but today I’m going to use Epsom Salt. I’m going to make 2 pounds of Bath Salt, so I need to use the Fragrance Calculator to determine the amount of Raspberry Fragrance Oil that I will need. A strong fragrance load is 1% or 8.7 mL for 2 pounds. I’m going to round this down to 8.5 mL because this will be easier for me to measure as well as allow me to keep my sanity. š Place salt into the plastic zip bag and add fragrance oil to the salt. Close the bag and knead the salt to mix the fragrance oil into the salt and break down any clumps. Once the clumps are gone, we can start spritzing the color onto the salts. I used 40 total spritzes on the salt. Now the salt is completely mixed, you can measure it into the gusseted bags and then tie the bags with ribbon. You can punch a hole through the Artist Trading Card and tie that card to the ribbon on the bag. Ta-da! The bath salts are now done and you have beautiful invitations. You can also use this idea for kids passing out birthday invitations, Valentine’s cards or other event invitations at school. One variation of an Artist Trading Card is to get your friends together and the card has the recipe on the front, and the contact information on the back. The local home brewers are now trading Brewer’s Trading Cards. Do a Spa Product Recipe Trading Card! Do a soap recipe trading card. Especially when the products are sampled, the Artist Trading Card becomes more valuable. I have attached a PDF of the ATC designed for this post here. Next week Iām going to show embedding objects in Melt & Pour Soap! |
 Front and back of the ATC designed for this post.  Adding Raspberry Fragrance Oil.  Kneading the fragrance oil into the salt.  Kneading in 10 spritzes of color. |
 Finished color using 40 spritzes of color.  Tied bag with ATC attached. |
 1/2 cup in a small gusseted bag. |