Happy Birthday

I have been working on 2 sets of note cards to give to my counselor and his receptionist as a late Christmas gift. I am making 10 cards for each of them. I figure, at least for me, birthday cards are the most-needed, so I'm including about 4 or 5 birthday cards in the mix for each of them. I created this one for that project, inspired by the "Anything Goes with ODBD Stamps" at Our Daily Bread Designs' blog this week.

I have been in love with this sketch from Splitcoaststampers.com for some time now, and never have really figured out what to do with it. It is really for a square card, which I rarely make. I decided to adapt it to an A2 size for this card, basically by elongating the background panels.

I also didn't have an oval die that would work with the measurements I figured out for this sketch. I even tried my Fiskars oval cutter, but the resulting oval was still proportionately too wide across the middle. So I decided to get creative and do some partial die cutting. I used one of the dies from Spellbinders' "Classic Ovals LG" set, that was the right width. After marking the centers on each end & each side of the die, I drew some guidelines to form a box on my white cardstock, to help me know where to place the die. I taped it to my paper, centered from side to side & lined up with the guideline at one end, and placed it between the cutting plates so only the top half of the die would cut. Then I repositioned it at the other end of my box, and die cut that half. Then I just penciled in slightly curved lines connecting the end points on each side, and cut that with my scissors. It may not be a "true" oval shape, but it works for my image and purposes!

After cutting my oval, I stamped the "Cattails" image from Our Daily Bread Designs on it, using Memento Tuxedo Black ink. I colored it with colored pencils, and set that aside while I worked on the rest of my card.

I stamped the greeting, from the "Birthday Blueprint" stamp/die set by Tim Holtz, onto a piece of light tan cardstock, again using Tuxedo Black. It was at this point that I wished I'd stamped my image onto cream cardstock, but I wasn't about to start over with cutting another oval. So I inked my focal image piece with Antique Linen Distress ink. I cut the greeting strip into a banner, and matted it with another banner I cut from kraft cardstock.

I cut my blue patterned paper (all papers are from Fancy Pants Designs' "Burlap & Bouquets 6x6" pad) to the approximate width I wanted, by 5.25" long. I die cut the top with one of the "Stitched Borders 2" dies from Pretty Pink Posh, centering the die side-to-side and making sure it was "level." I also die cut the scalloped strips from green cardstock using one of Pretty Pink Posh's "Stitched Borders 1" dies. I cut my burlap patterned paper to size, and positioned the scalloped borders behind each side. The sketch had called for the scalloped middle piece to be wider than the panel behind (burlap, in this case), but I decided I didn't like it overlapping the border strips so much. So I trimmed off about 3/16" from each side of the blue piece, to make it the same width as the burlap. I cut the burlap piece shorter, since it only had to show a little bit, and adhered it to the back of my blue panel. Then I cut that whole piece down to 5.25" long, & adhered the border strips to each side.

I cut two .5x5.25" strips from another of the patterned papers, and adhered them on either side of my main background panel. I mounted all that to a brown cardstock piece that I'd cut to 4.25x5.5". I glued my greeting banner to the bottom of my focal image piece, to help me with placement on my background. Finally, I adhered the image/greeting to my card front, and mounted that to a white A2 card base.

I'm also entering my card in Through the Craft Room Door's "Anything Goes" challenge.