Lace Tea Cup Happy Birthday Card

Here is a challenging new 5x7 happy birthday tea cup card. It combines fabric, die cutting, coloring, ribbon and distress. Click on the image for full directions if it interests you.

Wisking You Happy Birthday

 

This card uses a coloring technique I have never posted before. You use water based markers like Tombow markers as your paint on water color paper. You just apply the marker in the darkest areas and then using  water and a brush blend out the color. It's takes some practice to master how much ink you need to put down and how much water to use to move the ink without moving it outside the lines but overall it's a very inexpensive technique.

I saw this technique done with ease years ago but could never quite get the ink to move correctly until I discovered that you need to use particular marker and paper combinations. If you don't have the right paper the marker will soak in and will not move well.

As always, click on the images for full directions including the stamps used and paper sizes.

Swing Card

Here's a new card type I haven't made before - a swing card. When you grab the left and right hand sides and pull outward the image in the center swings and changes. Technically, when it's folded up and comes out of the envelope you are actually looking at the image on the back and then when you open it you see the image on the front.

I'm using rubber stamps that were specifically designed for a card of this type but you could actually use any front and back images.

Here's the card - it should show as an animated image that shows the card opening and closing. If it's not working because of where your reading it from, you'll need the click on the image to view the web directions.

After trying to make this a few times, the easiest way I found to cut the paper was to use a trimmer with a cutting blade that has a mark on it where the blade has/will cut. This helps ensure that your lines are straight even if your template placement wasn't perfect.

As always, click on the images for full directions including the stamps used and paper sizes.

Happy Birthday Definition Cards

Here are two more new cards. These were inspired by two new stamps I got and some one pound packs of cut up paper that had bunches of a few different colors cut down to 4x6 or smaller. Everything except the white card stock and the card base came out of these bargain packs.

I started out making a male design and decided to make a female version with pinks and yellows from a second pack. Like the last design, it's practically the same except for the color choices and glitter on the pink one but the choice of colors made the male card a female one. The cupcakes weren't part of the original design but that area looked too empty so I colored coordinating cupcakes and added them to the design.

As always, click on the images for full directions including the stamps used and paper sizes.

New HoneyPOP Cupcake Card

I found a leftover HoneyPOP cupcake from my previous card and you can't let a cupcake go to waste so I whipped up this new card design using it. Enjoy!


Outside Front

Inside of Opened Card


As always, click on the images for full directions from the website.

HoneyPOP Happy Birthday Cupcake

Here's a really cool card I designed using another of the Inky Antics HoneyPOP stamp sets with a honeycomb cupcake on the front that folds down for mailing. The recipient opens it up when they get it and folds it over so they can display it open and then close it back up when they want to store it. To add more dimension the bird is mounted using dimensional foam. The cherry was stamped again, cut out and then mounted on top of the other cherry on the mounted bird, which helps get the image up to same dimension as the honeycomb cupcake. The foam I used is very squishy so it collapses down in the envelope.

You can use almost any color you want for the cupcake top. I started out by using yellow so it was gender nuetral. The pink went best with the cherry theme though so that's the one I am sharing here.

As always, click on the image if you are interesting in reading the full directions.

Who Wants A Cruise For Their Birthday?

Here's a cool birthday card that proposes just that thought. I made versions of it using both colored pencils blended with mineral spirits on a blending stump and Copic markers. Since most cruises seem to be to warmer destinations, at least where I live, I tried to make a bright warm summer card, inspite of the snow that was on the ground at the time. The Copic marker version is brighter naturally while the colored pencil one looks good but the colors are a little fainter. Here are the two different versions:



Copic Marker Version



Blended Colored Pencil Version
Of course the recipient will not be getting a cruise. Inside it reads "Will you pick up my mail while I'm gone?" The perfect funny card for a cruise lover to give to someone or for you to tease a cruise lover.

As always click on a card image to see the full directions.

Mindscapes Butterfly Birthday Card

Here's a card Mom put together from butterfly leftovers I gave her.


I had stamped out a sheet or two or three of these butterfly images last year when I was planning to make one of these cards:


      
Not really sure which one started it all now but the original image turned out to be too big for what I had in mind so I moved on to a smaller butterfly image from another set and left these abandoned at the bottom of a paper scrap heap that I clean up recently. Good to see them put to good use.

Happy Birthday Cricut Flower Card

Once upon a time, in a craft table mess that still partially exists, I cut out a set of three nesting flowers on white cardstock a half inch smaller than each other using the Cricut machine. My plan was to color them using a low cost technique like the colored pencils and mineral spirits or maybe water blending Tombow markers. Whatever I was trying didn't quite work out as well as I hoped and the two smallest flowers of the set got buried under stuff from the next project, and then the next one, and the next one and so on.

Too much of the craft table had disappeared and it was time for an archeology dig. These long since abandoned white flowers cutouts were unearthed, along with many other forgotten and abandoned spare images and card parts. In a twist of fate, (or was it planned from the start months ago?), they happened to be exactly the same shape as the clear stamps for the butterfly wings in this month's {Stamps} of Life set and a new card was created.

The morale of the story is one of two possible things:

1. Don't ever throw anything away and keep it in a big pile as long as possible because it will be useful one day.
2. Cleaning up is a good thing

Which one were you thinking?

Here's the result of the archeological dig. The image doesn't do it justice. The flowers are extremely dimensional in person. As always, click on the card for full directions.

Did you frog-ot?

If you have frog-otten someone's Birthday already, it's never to too late to send them a card. Here's another card I put together with Purple Daisy stamps that I decided to stop just collecting and actually use this year. It's a fairly straight forward card. The images were colored with some quick and straight forward Copic marker blending and then because of the image size and my desire to make an A2 (4 1/4 x 5 1/2) sized card the frogs and sentiment are just mounted on top with dimensional tape.

It's probably not the last time you'll see this image or idea this year. I've got some ideas for more complicated cards with this that might get made in the next month or two so stay tuned.



As always, click on the images for full directions including the marker colors and paper sizes and if you've made similar frog cards, share them in a comment.

7 New Cards As Part of a Lost Challenge

Here's a bunch of cards I did a few years back for a card swap. I started the section for them as a challenge on the website about a year ago but since doing giveaways never really took off because no one comments they kind of got forgotten about. I wanted to make sure they got pushed out before the current year ended though as part of reorganizing the web site.

These cards are really interesting because the tag is attached using a tagger gun and tagger tail (like some of the price tags are attached to clothes) so it floats and moves freely on the front of the card.

The challenge for these cards was that I had to make 20 of them for the card swap but I didn't have the patterned paper to make anymore of the exact same design. I ended up redesigning the card a number of different times using different patterns and having to color coordinate between ribbon and ink and the pattern to get enough made.

Click on any of the card image to read more about how the card was make or about the challenge.

Birthday Wishes Cupcake

Here's another card I made to give away as a present. It's designed with neutral colors, which I guess slants it toward being a guy card with all the female designs out there. The cupcake is colored with Copic markers. The border is dotted to play on the dots that were in the words on the stamp. The background is stamped to match the curlies in the cupcake. Best of all can you believe all three of these came in a cling mount set I got at Michael's for two dollars or less earlier this year?

As always, click on the card for full directions if you want to know the Copic colors or paper sizes or just want to read all the steps involved.

Quick Female Birthday Card

Here's the female version of the last card. All I did was switch up some of the neutral or traditionally masculine colors with ones more typically associated with females. Since there were no flowers or glitter that's all it took to give this card a gender change.

I also switched the orientation. The words for this card were typed up on the computer and it didn't occur to me that I needed the words on a landscape mode for the neutral version until after I had already printed them all in a portrait layout so I went ahead and made these feminine versions.

Quick Male Birthday Card

Looking for some last minute gifts? How about giving some handmade greeting cards to your less crafty relatives who like to send out cards?

Here's a relative quick and easy card suitable for any gender that I'll be giving to someone who used to always hear things from the birdies about me when I younger. The birds are at three different physical layers because one is mounted directly to the card, another with 1/8" foam and the last one with 1/4" foam. Click on the card to get to the directions from the web site if you want to know more about it.