Personalized Birthday Card

The theme for Lawn Fawnatics Challenge #10 is "Custom Sentiments." I have a friend whose birthday is coming up soon, and decided to make her a card. I got the idea for the greeting from Jennifer McGuire.

For the main part of the card, I chose Lawn Fawn's "Claire's ABCs" & Sweet 'n Sassy Stamps' "Script Birthdays" stamp sets. I also used "Quinn's ABCs" & "Quinn's Capital ABCs" for her name. I decided a little rainbow stamping--OK, a lot!--was in order. What is more festive than bright rainbow colors??? :) I had 12 lines of text, not counting the name, so I decided to use 2 shades of each color.

Sizing the panel was the biggest challenge with this card. I initially planned on doing all the stamping on a 4x5.25" panel. Ha! I quickly realized all my stamping would take up way more real estate than that! I finally decided to do a "test copy," and cut a piece of copy paper. I set up my stamps on a few acrylic blocks, and stamped everything out like I wanted it on that paper. I determined from that test that my panel had to be 6-5/8" tall. So I cut a piece of Canson XL Mixed Media paper to 4-3/4x6-5/8". (My plan at this point was to make a 5x7" card, with my focal panel matted.) Then I marked the vertical center, so I could keep my stamping in the middle of the panel. (When I set up my stamps, I made sure to center them on my blocks--also not an easy task!)

I stamped out my greeting, going in rainbow order. I used Hero Arts Bubble Gum; Lawn Fawn Guava; Hero Arts Fresh Peach; Memento Tangelo; Hero Arts Butter Bar, Lemon Yellow, Lime Green, Green Hills, Pool; Memento Danube Blue, Grape Juice; & finished with Lawn Fawn Fresh Lavender. Whew! When it came to stamping the name, I used Versamark, and heat embossed with Recollections Snow detail embossing powder. I colored in those letters with my Tombow markers, choosing colors that went pretty well with the inks I'd chosen, and blending as I went across.

This is where my card design took a(nother) left turn. I wanted balloons, but didn't have enough room for them on my panel. No worries! I trimmed my panel to 3-1/2" wide (basically leaving 1/8" of space on either side of "Audra"), and cut 2 more narrow panels to go on either side. Now my card would be 5-1/2x6-5/8". I die cut several masks using the two smallest of Lawn Fawn's "Party Balloons" dies, and adhered them to one of my narrow side panels. I inked over them with Distress Oxide inks in Picked Raspberry, Fossilized Amber, Twisted Citron, Salty Ocean, & Wilted Violet, again going in rainbow order. After I finished inking, I spritzed on water from my Distress Sprayer, let that sit for a few seconds, then blotted it up with a dry cloth. I repeated the process on the other narrow panel. I was pleasantly surprised that, even though I'd used regular masking paper and the masks had stained when I sprayed the water, the balloon shapes on my inked panels remained white. Cool! :)

To finish my card, I created a portrait-oriented card base. I cut 2 pieces of white cardstock, one at 5-1/2x6-5/8" & the other 1/2" longer. I scored the longer one at 1/2", and adhered my other panel to the underside of the resulting flap. I adhered my side panels with my ATG tape runner, covering up the flap on the card base. For the center panel, I used Scor Tape to adhere a piece of craft foam to the back, and more Scor Tape to mount it to my card base.

I'm also entering this card in the following challenges:

Simon Says Stamp's Monday Challenge: "Happy Birthday"
613 Avenue Create Challenge #200: "Anything Goes" (not playing the "Shabby Chic" twist)