Happy Happy Birthday

The theme for December's Our Daily Bread Designs challenge at Operation Write Home is to use primary colors. I couldn't help but think of doing a child's birthday card. When I was looking through my stamps, I came across Spellbinders' "Your Day" set. I just love the elephant in this set, and had to use him. Thankfully, I was able to find an OWH sketch to accommodate the image!

I did have to "doctor" the sketch a bit. I made the focal panel slightly wider, to give the image a little more "breathing room." I also flipped it horizontally, and replaced the banner in the upper corner with the balloons.

I began by stamping my image onto a piece of 140 lb. watercolor paper with Ranger Archival Jet Black ink. I taped the panel to my cutting board that I use for watercoloring, and painted it with watercolors. For the ground, I smooshed some Pumice Stone Distress ink onto an acrylic block, then watered it down and applied a light wash to the bottom of the panel. I did the same with Tumbled Glass Distress ink for the sky portion. After drying it with my heat tool, I removed the tape and set it aside while I worked on the rest of the card.

I decided to use a greeting from this stamp set by Sweet 'n Sassy Stamps. The set comes with a solid balloon stamp that coordinates well with that particular greeting. I first stamped the balloon in Stampabilities "Light Pink" pigment ink onto white cardstock. When that dried, I stamped the greeting over it with Ranger's Adirondack Brights "Clover" ink. After giving that time to dry thoroughly, I fussy cut the balloon. I also used the smallest die from this Simon Says Stamp set to die cut 2 more balloons from patterned paper scraps.

For the background, I decided to go with a bright red. I found a piece of yellow gingham patterned paper in my scrap stash, and cut a strip of that to go along the side of the red. After gluing the gingham paper to the red cardstock, I die cut the panel with the largest die from My Favorite Things' "Blueprints 13" set. I also matted the focal panel with blue cardstock, leaving a 1/16" border all around.

Finally, it was time to assemble the card. I determined where I wanted the focal panel in relation to the 3 balloons, and adhered it to the background. I tied white embroidery floss around the bottoms of the pink & yellow balloons. (The bottom of the blue balloon would not be showing, so I didn't add floss around that.) Since I wanted the elephant to be "holding" the balloons, I poked a hole on each side of his trunk. After gluing the balloons in place, I threaded the other end of the embroidery floss through the holes, and wrapped it around the trunk. Finally, I tied a small bow with more floss, and adhered it over the floss around the trunk with a small dab of Ranger Multi Medium Matte. I decided I had to use a googly eye to up the cute factor, so I used more Multi Medium to glue one on the elephant.

The only thing left was to adhere the finished card front to a cream A2 card base, and this card for Operation Write Home is DONE!

I'm also entering this card in Simon Says Stamp's Wednesday "Anything Goes" challenge.