Some More Special Birthday Cards

I found this gorgeous kitty on a Kids Coloring Site that I stumbled across while looking for freebie digital images to colour in! If you colour her coat and tail piece red, she'd easily become a Christmas Kitty, but fake fur isn't only worn in December...especially not here in South Africa!! I made this card for Gillian, a cat-mad friend. In case you're wondering, I coloured everything in with good ol' pencil crayons! I put white Flower Soft on the furry areas.
One of my card making friends, Lizette told me that this is a Bengal Cat - I thought you only got Bengal tigers!! Check out this link!

Gav & I were invited to Glen's 40th Birthday Party yesterday and as Glen is Golf-mad, I decided to make this special card for him. Well he was so chuffed, it was well worth the time and effort :-)

The Golf Bag & Clubs Iris Folding Pattern is also a freebie I found on the net from a company called Circle of Crafters. I added the "40" after the original photo to personalize it even more. I also made the square envelope. All the golf stickers were from Creative Memories.

The rest of the stickers on the inside of the card were added at the party. I had taken them with me in case Glen's wife, Amanda wanted to see what stickers they were. Glen saw the bag and the golf cart & begged me to stick them inside the card, so I decided to make a 'kiddie picture' out of them ;-) Well that made his night!! LOL!!!

Double Pocket Cards

We had a challenge at our October Crafters Group set by Susan...a Double Pocket Card. Susan gave us the cm measurements as the e-mailed instructions were in inches, which can be tricky for us South Africans to work with!

Usually the papers used on cards would be scrapbooking paper, unless one is into creating your own backgrounds (which I sometimes do!), but seeing as I've been on a roll with Reconditioned Christmas Cards, I decided to use a couple of identical cards and another one of similar shades to decorate my card.

I was quite chuffed with the result...incorporated lacy punched borders and a bow (yeah I should have neatened off the ribbon before taking photos, but I'm NOT redoing them!)
The idea of the second, lower pocket is to tuck money or, as in my card, a gift card...much nicer than the folder you get from Woolies, etc.

My one friend, Paola has been picked out for neglecting the inside of her cards and that got me thinking, so I took a different shade of the commercial card, trimmed it down and stuck it inside. I would have to either write with a permanent marker as it's a bit glossy or stick another matte paper somewhere to write my greeting.

Then I decided to make a similar card for my friend, Kathleen for her birthday. I wanted to use flowers as Kathleen is into Flower Arranging. She has recently opened a facebook page called: K's Flowers if you'd like to take a peek at her photos. My attempt wasn't nearly as good as her real things, but I had fun anyway.

Here's a close up of the roses. I stamped the small basket with the Walnut Ink Distress Inkpad, stuck the leaves down and the two tiny closed buds up near the handle first, then positioned the bigger roses. I twirled 2 of the stems around a toothpick and the others I snipped off to enable me to stick the heads down alone. The white pearls sticking out at the right are a type of bridal garland.

This is just to show you what the separate tag looks like...it gets tucked into the deeper top pocket and I tucked a small handmade envelope with a money gift into the lower pocket. I have so many Metallic Confetti Sentiments, so decided they have to be used. This Happy Birthday is somewhat unusual, I think. The pretty silver leafy borders are Peel-offs. The darker pink flowery 'petals' behind the flower circle are cut with a Nestabilities Die Set called Blossom Two.

October 2010 FunDay Challenge at Susan's

When Susan issued this challenge in September, she asked us to please do it ASAP and not leave it to the night before as some of us (me included!) have done previously.
We were asked to dig deep and fish out our oldest stamp - one of the first that we'd bought about 10 years ago. Then we were to tizzy it up with lots of bling, ribbons, flowers, etc. that we use on our cards now. ALSO, we had to use the Colourwheel and Triad colours - i.e. the colours that form a triangle.

This was my entry:


The spotty background is scrapbook paper, the red scallop and the blue "flower" behind the circle are Nestabilities. I stamped the basket with the Walnut Ink Distress ink and used an earbud to stretch the colour, dipping it into the stamp pad and water to help the process. I enhanced the basket a bit by adding some Vintage Photo Distress colour as well.
After the flowers and unusual blue leaves were stuck in place, I dry-brushed some stickles across the flowers to make them 'blingy'.

I'm chuffed to say that although I came second, I won the prize :-)
Susan sponsored the prize and her card actually came first and she didn't want her own prize...





This is one of the first cards I made with the basket stamp. Back in those days it was the 'in thing' to use multicoloured stamp pads...this one is called Primrose & was made by ColorBox. It has the colours listed at the back: Turquoise, Peony, Lavender, Violet, Lilac and Pink, which made it easy to buy the refill inks, which I still have! The little flowers were painstakingly cut out one by one and 3D'd onto the basket - quite an advanced technique back then!! LOL
Metallic Confetti (butterflies) were all the rage then, too and I even 3D'd the big one!



Then at one of the Casual clubs, the girls asked if I would consider making the card a workshop card, so I decided to try something similar, but as an A6 card. It has potential and I must just decide on new colours according to the packets of flowers I have for use in the class.