Birthday Card for a Friend

Hello!  I had an unanticipated mid-week project come up this week, and wanted to share what I did with it.  My friend, E (of the M and E anniversary card in July) has an October birthday.  I have known this for many years.  I am kind of funny with birthdays (warning: digression ahead)- I am pretty good about remembering what month they are in, and usually remember around when they are, as far as beginning, middle, or end of the month.  But apart from my immediate family members and a couple of close friends who I've known since childhood, I don't remember exact dates so well.  This was the case with E's birthday- I know it's October, somewhere in the middle, and that's it.  Last year, I manged to get her a birthday bookmark within a week of her birthday, purely by luck.  This year, I got a Facebook alert the day before.  Aha!  Facebook IS good for something!  Since her birthday was mid-week, I did have a little bit of leeway, but wanted to get a card done for her so that it was ready to go whenever I can get it over to her this weekend.

Now, unlike the anniversary card, I did not have any trouble coming up with a design for this one.  I have known E for a number of years and know her tastes pretty well.  She is bright, energetic, intelligent, beautiful, kind and generous, with an outgoing, friendly personality.  She is the type of person who will strike up conversation with the person standing in front of her in the grocery store checkout line, and by the end of the conversation you'd think they'd known each other for years.  It's a skill that, as an introvert, I have admired in her for years!  So when I think of E, I think of deep, rich, vibrant colors and textures that draw the eye and make you want to keep looking at them.  I know that E favors jewel tones, just like I do, so this was fun for me to pick out papers and colors and come up with a design.  When I first started thinking about it, my mind went immediately to purple...deep, rich plum-toned purple, maybe combined with a deep blue or green or teal, some gold, lots of texture, shine, the works.  I didn't have anything like that in my paper stash, so a trip to Michael's was in order.  Luckily I had some coupons that came in my email just the day before, so yesterday after work, I stopped in to pick something out.  I could not find anything close to what I envisioned, but I did find a pad of scrapbooking paper that had a lovely paper with a glittery floral pattern.  The color is somewhere between red and purple- I've been trying to figure out what to call it, but haven't quite pinpointed it yet.  It's not as pink as raspberry, not as red as cranberry, not as bright as fuschia, not as purple as grape.  Well, you be the judge!

Mulberry, maybe?  I guess it really is more red than purple, but there are definitely blue tones to it.

So here is the breakdown.  Deep reddish (burgundy?) card base, followed by an off-white layer, which has an iridescent finish.  The left panel is the patterned paper, while the right is a coordinating solid reddish (maroon?) paper, which I embossed with the Big Shot and a Cuttlebug embossing folder.  If it looks familiar, it's because it's the same one I used on this card.  I ran into a bit of trouble, because the paper was longer than the embossing folder.  I had to emboss it in two sections, and consequently the bottom section, which was only about 2 inches, had to be embossed upside down.  Hopefully it's not obvious- it is partially covered up by the flower anyway.  I chose that embossing folder because of the viney design, which was sort of similar to the floral patterned paper.  This card design, by the way, was inspired partially by this card, which I didn't even realize until after I was almost finished with it.  Anyway, the middle piece has the same deep reddish (merlot?) paper for the outer border that was used as the card base, followed by the lighter paper, which is the same as the embossed panel. I punched the corners of the outer piece with a lace corner punch.  The sentiment box is the same off-white iridescent paper as the layer over the card base.  I stamped the sentiment and flourishes in an eggplant pigment ink and heat embossed them with the sparkly iridescent embossing powder.  The ribbon that separates the two panels is a shiny satin ribbon that worked perfectly with these colors.

I have to tell you about this flower.  A couple of weeks ago, I had a dream about making a card with a white flower on it, wherein the flower petals were crimped.  Now, I didn't own a crimper, though I had looked at them before in the craft stores.  A couple days after that, I was at Michaels with a pocket full of coupons, and decided to just take the plunge and use a 50% coupon on it.  So I did, even though I did not have a use for it at that time, being that my dream was non-specific about what card I would use it on.  So fast forward to this week, when it was time to make an embellishment for this card.  I looked over all of my punches and Sizzix flower dies, and none of them were really what I had in mind for this card.  My dream came back to me, and though I didn't have anything that was exactly like the flower petals in my dream (which were wider at the bottom, and more blunt), I figured I could work with what I had and come up with something.  So I used the same flower dies that I used for these poinsettias, and simply cut the petals apart so that they were separate, then crimped them using the paper crimper.  I glued the petals together at the center to form the flower, and finished it with a large pearl in the center.  I experimented with and additional layer of petals, but in the end, the simple 5-petal flower looked the best to me.  Instead of leaves, I went with ribbon ends peeking out from beneath the flower.  Here's a close-up:

On the inside, I stamped and embossed a sentiment in the same eggplant ink.  I used two layers for the inside, which I corner punched with the same punch from the sentiment box frame on the card front.

I had a lot of fun with this card!  I hope E likes it.  I wished her Happy Birthday on Facebook yesterday, and she responded back that she can't wait to see the card, and said that she still has the anniversary card on her pantry door.  How sweet is that?!!


Next time I will have some mini-cards to share, as that is next on my agenda.  Also, tomorrow is Saturday, which means a new sketch from CardPatterns, so we'll see what I can do with that!