Vintage 60th Birthday Card

Today I bring you a card which took me AGES!!! Now you may look at it and question why it took so long, but I kept changing my mind!

There's quite a lot of pictures to show how this came together. I started off by stamping some sage green paper with an ivy leaf (My Minds Eye -Wild asparagus) in bright green. I like the tone on tone look with that. I then used spellbinders labels 1 die to cut the main paper and wanted to make a raised front to the card, so needed to cut a matching piece of cream card with the next size labels 1 die. To make sure they matched up perfectly I layered them up and drew through with the smaller die to help my positioning. The pictures probably show it better.

 I inked very gently around the inside of the labels shape with gold ink, and around the outside of the sage paper. You can see this better on the later images.

I then printed off the numbers 60 onto some white card so I could cut them out. I used my cuttlebug to emboss the numbers (I used provocraft Divine swirls), and then used distress inks to give them a vintage look. I used a scalpel to cut the inside of the numbers, and it wasn't too neat, but once embossed it wasn't noticable.

The paper you can see in the right picture is actually a skelton leaf piece of paper, and is very delicate, but matches the colours of forest moss and tea dye really well.

I had originally wanted the card to be landscape, as I based it on a card I saw over at Waltzingmouse, so I tried that first.

Somehow, it just didn't look the way I wanted, and I couldn't figure out how to finish it off, so eventually I decided to rotate it and make it portrait instead, and then had to figure out what I wanted across the bottom. I tried ribbon, vellum, but finally decided on card with a printed sentiment. This next photo shows more faffing I did trying to get it right.

The top shows vellum stamped with gold and black ink sentiments, and I used some promarkers to test the colours. I decided I didn't like it! I then embossed two lines on some cream card, stamped the sentiment and was sponging...but got a little carried away! So I had to start again on a new piece of cream card, emboss and stamp! The sentiment is Banana Frog, and the little Maple leaves are Waltzingmouse Teeny trees. I stamped in Forest moss distress ink. I did a little sponging this time with gold ink.

Finally I pieced it all together, layering up with foam pads - ideally I would have used thicker foam to make the aperture stand out more, but alas I had none!

I took this picture without the flash so you could see the natural shadows.

So there it is, 4 hours worth of crafting!