There are two new trends in handmade card making emerging at the moment - using A6 sized cards, and faux embossing.  And the biggest benefit of these new trends is that they will not cost you any money - in fact they will save you money in your card making! And in the current economic climate we can all do with saving a few pennies.
The first emerging trend is the size of cards. Recently large A4 cards have been in trend. Personally I was not a big fan of large cards, so I am extremely pleased that A6 cards are making a comeback! I've always been a fan of A6 cards and they are my preferred choice. An A6 sized card is still versatile, and it can have the complexity of larger cards. But, in my opinion, A6 cards can have a simple elegance that you simply cannot achieve with an oversized card. Posting A6 sized cards in the UK is also much easier and cheaper that A4 sized cards, even if they are heavily layered or decoupaged. The other huge benefit of smaller A6 cards is that need less materials to make them - smaller pieces of backing paper, smaller bits of card or paper for matting and layering, and smaller toppers. So not only will your cards look fantastic, but they will cost you less to make!
The second hot trend that you're going to be seeing a lot of is faux embossing. Basically, this is flat paper that looks like it has the texture and interest of embossing. And as with any new trend, buying the materials is never going to be cheap! But I have a few ideas to enable you to achieve your own faux embossing. Therefore you can save a bit of money, and also be ahead of the trend!
Most handmade card makers use embossing techniques on their cards sometimes. There are two main types of embossing - dry embossing and heat embossing. I'm not going to go into detail about how to achieve these two effects here. If you search the web you'll find lots of advice and tips. For the purpose of this article I'm going to presume that you are already an accomplished embosser!
How to achieve faux embossing can be described in a couple of paragraphs! It really is that simple. Without the need to go to the shops or order anything from the internet you can have made your first faux embossed card with an hour!
First you need to take a piece of paper. The first time I tried this technique I just used a cheap piece of coloured photocopying paper. I used the dry embossing technique to emboss the whole piece of paper. I used my Fiskars Shapeboss because that is what I had to hand! Once I had embossed the whole sheet (just as I would do to make a sheet of embossed backing paper), I used my all-in-one printer, scanner and photocopier to make a coloured photocopy of my embossed sheet. The printed image shows the embossing! And you have a faux embossed sheet of backing paper! That's it. It really is that simple. I also scanned in a copy of the image to store on my computer so I can easily use it again in the future, without having to emboss another sheet of paper. Give it a try - you'll be surprised how effective this technique is.