Birthday card for Joshua

One of our young neighbours celebrated his 10th Birthday earlier this monthly and I whipped up a card, CASE-ing a wonderful snippets card that was one of my fortnightly picks back in July - made by Nicky and you can see her original HERE. Do take a look as you'll see just how fab. it looks made on a black background.

I loved the drama of the black backing card that Nicky used but went for white in the end - just felt that Josh isn't old enough for black background cards as yet:

I used:

- 5" x 3.75" white card blank, side opening, an odd size I know but I made it to fit the stitched panel I was using next!

- a ready die cut rectangle of card which I found in my white snippets box - it had been die cut using a Lil'Inkers' 'Stitched Rectangles' die

- before going any further I stamped the word 'Birthday' onto the bottom right hand corner of the card  using a stamp which I'd chopped apart (it came with 'That Folder' as a magazine freebie some time ago) Sadly, the stamp isn't decent quality and I was glad to have the Misti to stamp it multiple times - basically the stamp has deteriorated over time, despite being stored away from light and heat and even after being washed it's practically lost its 'stick' and also doesn't stamp very well. Shame, but it owes me nothing anyhow

- then I found five snippets of plain brightly coloured card and die cut the letters for the word HAPPY from them - using dies from the First Edition 'Alphabet Sans Serif' set of upper case dies

- next it was time to cut the strips below which the letters would be stuck and it's a good job I checked each I die cut letter for width first as both the A and the Y are wider than the other letters I used

- cut the strips to the widths of each letter and then cut them to lengths of 2.5" and 2.25" and glued them onto the stitched rectangle using Collall all-purpose glue. The easiest way to do this was to find the centre of the panel, mark it with a soft pencil and work outwards - and it was very lucky that each side of the row of strips contained a wider one - which meant that the strips lined up correctly at each edge of the panel - hooray!!

- then used a Zig glue pen to add the letters to the bottom of the matching strips of card - finished!

Thank you so much for this great idea Nicky - I was really delighted with the result and certainly will use the same technique again. Nicky used her Scan 'n Cut but I had some reasonably chunky letter dies here which meant I could still have a go.

In previous years I've taken a lot of time and trouble working out suitable themes for the kiddies who live around us, adding their ages and names to each Birthday card as well. I know they were appreciated but as the kiddies grow up it gets harder to find a 'theme' and we aren't in each others pockets so really I don't know their latest 'likes' most of the time. In future I'll make more generic cards for them - plus, it takes a lot less of my time, which is still at a premium here. Funny how a little bundle of white fluff called Dudley totally makes you stop and realise that some of the smaller details in life are not really important enough to spend oodles of time over.