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This blog is for sharing a love of paper crafting. You can also check out my Pintrest pages. If you find the ideas here to be helpful, I'd love to hear from you. It is what helps make the time I put into this blog feel worthwhile, and always brightens my day. I love hearing your ideas too!

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Sunday, February 3, 2013

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.


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