Masculine Birthday Card

I have been trying to do more masculine cards for Operation Write Home lately, since I get the impression at least that they tend to get more feminine cards. And the women who are serving overseas in our military still need something to send home to their husbands or boyfriends! So the latest effort in my mission is this birthday card.

I took my inspiration for this design from this OWH sketch:

While I couldn't quite figure out how to make the focal-point piece in the sketch, it reminded me of this Cut-Fold-Tuck die set by Spellbinders that I have. So I pulled out one of the dies from that set, and die cut it from double-sided patterned paper from 7gypsies' "Venice" 6x6" paper pad. (With the Cut-Fold-Tuck dies, double-sided paper or cardstock is really necessary.) After folding & tucking the small triangular pieces, I ran the whole thing through my Xyron machine, to apply adhesive to the back. I had tried backing the die cut with a few different colors of cardstock, trying to figure out what color I wanted to mat it with. I finally matted it with black, which I cut to create a 1/16" border.

For the panel behind the die cut, I played around with different cardstocks & patterned papers, again not sure what I wanted. I finally decided to pull out a scrap of silver cardstock, and embossed it with the "Squares" Fiskars texture plate from this set. I initially cut it to 4x5.25", as in the sketch. But, since the die cut piece was smaller than the corresponding piece in the sketch, it seemed rather lost on the silver panel. So I ended up cutting 1/2" off 2 sides of the panel, to make it 3.5x4.75". I matted the silver onto a piece of black paper cut 1/8" larger all around, and then mounted that on kraft cardstock, cut to 4x5.25". I finally cut a piece of grid-patterned paper from Farm House's "302 Paper Pack" 6x6" pad, to 4.25x5.5", and matted the card panel onto that.

I printed the greeting on a piece of kraft cardstock I'd cut to 1" by slightly less than 4" long. I cut it into a banner shape, & stapled one end to the card front with my Tiny Attacher tool, to keep with the masculine "metal" look. I also threaded a teal-blue button (to echo the blue in the die cut piece) with silver embroidery floss, and glued that to the banner with some Glossy Accents. Finally, I adhered the card front to an A2-size card base.

I'm entering this card in Simon Says Stamp's Wednesday "Happy Birthday" challenge.