One Birthday Card, Hold The Sentiment

Here's a quick and simple gatefold card that uses 4 different papers from the Nana's Kid stack. The party hat and balloon are whale  punches with some kid's glitter on them. The present is just a square cut out with a paper trimmer. Someone forgot to tie a bow on it though. The white dots on the paper come pre-embossed so the card has a lot of texture in person. The hat and balloon are bumped up.

I tried the card with green paper in the background and different colors for the hat, balloon and box but this was the color layout I liked the best. If you want things to match better instead of pop, use a more muted background color that more closely matches one of the colors in the card and the embellishments. Since there are already multiple shades of orange/peach, putting it all on the darker muted orange helped to frame it all an make it pop more.

The Differences Give This Simple Card Appeal

Here's another male card using paper from Nana's Kids stack. The dotted circles in the background are a large Stampin' Up! background stamp that I used to make my own red themed designer paper. Adding the background stamp added just enough extra that even though this a very easy card to make it looks complete. The only other real trick is that every one of the squares is mounted differently so there is no obvious pattern. This confounds you and makes you look at it longer. The squares were intentionally placed. The first two on the left lead you toward the sentiment and the final one on the right is horizontal simply to make it more different than the one its next too.

More Circus Animals

If you couldn't quite get a good look at the animals on the train in the previous two cards, here they are in large print. This was different paper but it's really inspired by the tools and stamps I already had out from making those. The light green here is the green I suggested using in place of the blue background paper on the simple train. The circle punch got used again but this time I punched a circle in the top layer to make a window. Next I stamped the image on vellum and let it dry and stamped it on white paper. You then take these two images and overlap them perfectly. This creates a softer looking image than you get with just white paper but a much bolder image than you get with just stamping on the vellum or white and adding the other layer without an image on it. Mount that in the window and then mount all that on the brown to hide the sandwich layers. I keep thinking the card is missing something but all the stars on the paper come pre-glittered and I don't want to cover up the mostly complete animal images that are left.

The Quick and The Complicated Birthday Train, part 2

This is the same train paper from the previous post but this card is a lot more complicated and brings in most of the colors from it while still being very male oriented. It's much more complicated and time consuming to construct than the previous one but when you look at the quick one and the complicated one, which one would you buy if they were side by side in a store?

This card plays very heavily on geometric relationships. Every piece of paper attached to the front has been inked along the edge in brown to stress the shapes and lines.

The happy birthday and cupcake are from Stampin' Up!. If you have the whale punches, its easy to stamp this and then punch it out upside down. By that I mean you hold the punch in your hand so you are looking at the bottom of it and place the paper inside the punch upside down so you can see where the image is through the hole. I guess any circle punch you can turn upside and manage to squeeze closed or even a circle template would work but the big expensive whale punches are the fastest way to get it done when they fit in my opinion.

If geometry skills eluded you, the only way to get the circle to fit perfectly like it does is to cut a square (all 4 side are the same length) about a half an inch larger than the diameter of the circle. You get the green to overlap perfectly on all 4 sides by cutting another square with sides that about half an inch short than the diagonals in the green paper. If you miss geometry class, you can use the Pythagorean theorem to calculate the lengths you need.

The Quick and the Complicated Birthday Train, part 1

Here's a super quick kid's card using the train paper from Nana's Kids cardstack and two clear stamps.

Instead of picking up the blue and using it for the background paper I could have just as easily picked up the green. A light green that would go with the brown would probably slant the card away from being something you could easily give to a little boy and more toward a nuetral or even female bias.

Pretty Paper, A Flower Button, A Fastenator, Ribbon and Glitter

If you have been following my previous posts, this is the same paper that served as the inspiration for the previous card. In fact, this one came first and the previous card was actually made from the leftover strip that was cut off the top of this one. You can get a much better appreciation of the paper on this card - it was really designed to show off the paper. Can you guess what my two other goals were? Using the fastenator and incorporating a button are the correct guesses. In order to tie the elements together, I ended up covering a square of the white paper with silver glitter glue to set off the button and adding a line of silver glitter glue right above the scalloping. The ribbon border at the top is pretty thick so the whole strip of white paper is bumped up. This also helps hide the fastenator's prongs if you attach it just to the white strip of paper. The Happy Birthday stamp was just as hard to use as it was on the previous cards, but it gave an image that had the right height and width and most importantly, it was still sitting on the craft table from the previous card.

A Green Flower Can Be the Perfect Accent

This card and the previous one share the same design inspiration. This one was designed around a different sheet of paper from the Nana's Kids stack though so it looks very different. The paper has a lot of pink in it, so the card background needed to become pink with white and green as the accent colors. The scanner didn't pick it up but the paper has a lot of glittered accents like the flowers and various clear vertical lines.

With the ladybug paper, I was trying to keep whole ladybugs visible. Because this paper was basically vertical stripes with flower accents, I didn't feel the need to keep as much of it visible even though it is very pretty paper and helps make the card. This allowed me to use a Happy Birthday stamp that had a lot more weight to it. Since that had more visual weight, I was able to use a larger green flower to add texture and dimension and bring out the green more. I have to honestly say I never thought I would find a use for the green flowers in this set but it really sets the card off and makes it a perfect blend of all the colors in the strip of Nana's Kids cardstock that I started with to make this card. The green flower came preshaded and preveined in a clear box of flowers from Oriental Trading. The Happy Birthday stamp was from a clear stamp set.

Nana's Laddybug Happy Birthday

If you are following the date and times on these post, you might be wondering how I am making them so fast. I actually made them and scanned them in August and September and have just gotten around to creating this blog so I have a backlog of over 45 original cards that will be appearing here in the near future. They are all original creations, or at least the combinations of products and the layouts are an original creation. I will try to document where the different parts originate from and construction issues as best as I reasonably can while I can still remember them.  If I get time, I may go back and edit these posts with more exact details on the title of the stamp set or the exact paper or ink color.

Now back to the cards....

The pink and green ladybug center strip comes from the Nana's Kids stack. The Happy Birthday sentiment is a clear stamp that has been stamped on the embossed line paper I used for the flower stripe card. The center strip is also mounted on that paper. Remember how I said that stamp was hard to use? Well this is where the paper that ended up with unreadable circles went. Finally, its mounted on a piece of Stamin' Up! pink card stock - that was the only pink I had that matched the ladybugs. The flower is out of a generic clear box of flowers I got from Oriental Trading. The flower center is just a big drop of glitter glue. The ink was a Tsenukio pearlescent ink. It was the only ink I could find that the clear Happy Birthday stamp would take. I love how you can see where you are stamping with them but all of the clear stamps seem to made from different materials and many of them seem to be ink phobic. It worked out in the end though. The ink I was forced to use gave the words a nice shimmer that really sets off the card when you see it in person. The bottom sentiment is a Stampin' Up! stamp inked with the same ink.

A Simple Yet Bold Happy Birthday Card

Here's a super simple card. The white paper is from the local big craft store. The JPG image conversion removed the embossing detail, but it is embossed with lines, adding to the cards horizontal feel. The flowers are part of one of the sheets in the Nana's Kids stack. I cut it off the sheet and matted in onto yellow then black cardstock to give the center strip a strong visual appeal against the black letters. The black letters are from a clear stamp set I have. The stamp is difficult to use because if any extra ink seeps into the narrow letter area, you can't make out the letter so you have to ink it just right to get a a good impression but not so much that you get black circles instead of a negative image.

Nana's Kids Get Well Card for Men

Why let a good idea go waste? Here is a version of the previous pink get well card using a different version of the bubble paper from the Nana's Kids stack. The colors in this one are guy friendly.

You can't tell from the picture but the red backing the sentiment is attached to the ribbon only. The same was done on the pink card. This allows the sentiment to float a little bit without introducing any bulk that get in the way of mailing it a normal card sized envelope.