Happy Birthday!

My Dad's birthday is coming up and I need a nice masculine card - but that was only part of what inspired this one.  I've undertaken a bit of a project that I hope will both inspire me and serve to make card creation go quicker and easier.  I guess it worked for this card at least!

What I've been doing is this. I have taken several sheets of plain colored papers (some with a bit of shimmer to them) and cut and embossed them in a variety of ways.  So often in making a card, I need a bit of a plain color to set the pattern off nicely.  This allows me to have a bunch of options made ahead so I can just look through them quickly and grab what I need.

In this case, I had embossed a bunch of things using pieces of cream colored paper and was starting to do the same with a dark brown.  This time, rather than just using one embossing folder per piece of paper, I experimented with a couple of little embossing folders to see if I could use them both on the same piece.  As you can see, it worked!  The swirl was one little folder and the Happy Birthday was another.  (Tip: to help ensure you don't get unwanted lines from around the outside of the little folders, cut a piece of cardstock that is smaller than the folder and make your embossing sandwich with the cardstock as a shim right underneath the folder.)  That left a little area that was just perfect for one of my pre-embossed cream colored cake pieces, and I just HAD to stop and make the card!

As you can see, I rounded all corners with a corner rounder punch and added a cream colored mat.  I felt the embossing didn't stand out as well as I would have liked, so I took a metallic marker (from Sharpie) and went over the raised areas on both the brown and the cream.  I also drew with the marker around the cream piece for a bit of a frame.

I went looking for a patterned paper that would coordinate well with brown and cream and found this piece with my scraps.  It is actually one side of a double-sided Christmas paper!  I don't remember who made it, but it was sold as a part of a Christmas Paper pad of paper.  Anyway, after inking the edges, I thought it made a great background for my embossed focal.

With the focal finished, and the background ready, I felt the card needed a little something at the bottom, so I grabbed the thin strip of pre-embossed border that I had made and once again colored the embossing with the Sharpie.  Then all I had to do was glue everything in place.

For the inside, I used another piece of the tan patterned paper.  I wanted a place to stamp/write my message, so cut out a piece from the center with a Spellbinder's die, making a frame (see tomorrow's post for what I did with the inside piece!).  I once again used a make-up sponge with ink to shade around the edges of my frame.