Materials Swap (Dots) and a Video

Today's card was inspired by two things.  First, I needed to create two identical sets of materials that included DOTS.  One of these sets was to be sent to my swap partner, and one I was to make a card from myself.  The 2nd inspiration was this video about using Hunkydory Little Book Pages.

The materials I gathered started with a piece of dotted yellow ribbon from my stash, and then I went looking to see what would coordinate well with it.  I found myself looking through the pages of the Hunkydory Little Book of Kittens, where I found the main focal, a coordinating greeting, and a smaller image (which I ended up putting inside the card).  Then I searched for and found a variety of coordinating papers.  These, with a card blank turned into the "kit" that I sent my swap partner and from which I made this card.  You can see the set of materials here:

Here's the card again and a few remarks about how I made it:

If you compare the card front with the materials, you can see that the first thing I did was to trim the sides off the focal to make it more narrow.  I matted it multiple times and cut away the card front to form a narrower panel.  The border is actually on the inside of the card. And the greeting, which I double-matted, extends beyond the card front as you can see.  I added a scrap of ribbon that was knotted and notched at the ends to look like a tie holding the balloons together.  I felt we needed a bit more yellow near the bottom, so I used a standard paper punch to create three yellow dots that I glued in place in the bottom left-hand corner.

 

Inside:

I wanted to make sure the dotted ribbon was part of a border that was seen when the card was unopened, since dots were an important part of the make (though the light blue paper also has dots on it).  After much consideration, I started by covering the entire inside of the card with a yellow checked paper.  Then I created a border using a strip I had cut from the focal, multiple mats, and the ribbon - making sure it showed to the front of the card the way I wanted it to do.  As you can see, I completed the inside by adding a textured yellow piece in the center (that would allow for easier reading of a hand-written greeting), adding another strip of the blue for a border on the left, adding my fussy cut image, and a die cut greeting.  (Cutting die was from Spellbinders Joyous Celebrations Sentiment die set.)

It's always fun to see what a swap partner does with the same materials!  I actually ended up making 3 sets and gave one to my Mom.  Here's the card my Mom made:

Outside: (aperture card)

 

Inside:

And the one my swap partner made:

 

Inside: