Sunday, July 31, 2011

A Card for a Midsummer's Day

 
Hello everyone, I hope you are having a simply fabulous summer! I wanted to share my latest card and some photos I took along the way when creating it. As you can see, it is a stair-step card. I chose the colors pink, yellow and orange for the flowers because I think they are so warm and summery and just plain pretty together.

I began by making all the flowers. For the small ones I used a McGill punch called Petite Flowers. It cuts three different flower heads. The leaves were die-cut from the Cricut Serenade cartridge. The polka dot glitter card stock is from the DCWV Homemade Christmas Stack. The stems were cut free hand. I inked the edges and used craft glue to assemble.  I made 14 small flowers, approximately 2" tall.

Then I made five larger flowers of varying sizes. These three orange flowers were cut from the Serenade cartridge...
Flowers are 3", 3 1/4", and 3 3/4" tall. Stems and leaves cut freehand.

...and the layered pink ones were too. Serenade is kinda' my go-to cartridge. It was one of the first cartridges I purchased and I still love it and use it all the time. The stem/leaf cut used below is from Walk In My Garden. All the edges were inked and the flowers were assembled with craft glue. Glitter was added to the five large flowers.
Flowers are approximately 3 1/4" tall.

Next I die-cut 'Happy Birthday' for the sentiment. The Winter Woodland cart has a wonderful font that I welded together using Design Studio. The letters were tipped this way and that to add a little whimsy. I saved the 'Happy Birthday' design to use again in the future. You can zoom in on all the photos for more detail.

And now...
...time out to look at my gorgeous youngest grandson, Logan. He's sleeping in grandpa's arms. Look at those eyelashes! Doesn't he look so sweet and innocent?  XOXOXOX
Of course, this is what he is really like! He's two and a half and totally rotten! XOXOXOXOXOX


Anyway, back to the subject at hand! Flowers and sentiment,
all ready to go!

I had a ready-made template for this stair-step card. I've been making all my templates out of this lime green card stock to keep on hand. On it are the overall dimensions and where to make the score lines. This one is 6 1/2" by 10 1/2". Scored at 1 1/4", 2 1/2", 4 1/4", 6", and 8 1/4".  A cream colored card stock was used for the base.
Being an old-fashioned Graphic Designer, I like to do things by hand.

After the card base was folded I decided on a background color for the flowers. This blue really made them pop.

Green 'hills' were cut freehand to 'plant' the flower stems on.

The biggest flowers were adhered first. I wanted them to be the focus with the little flowers surrounding them.

As I arranged and adhered the small flowers I closed up the card from time to time to make sure the layers were flowing together nicely.

I decided the Happy Birthday sentiment needed a drop shadow to make it pop a little. Back into Design Studio to group and enlarged the words a little and cut them out in yellow card stock.
After 'Happy Birthday' and the rest of the flowers were adhered, the back panel was covered with coordinating paper and a flower was added. This makes a nice space for someone to write a personal message.

And here it is all finished!

I hope you enjoyed seeing how this stair-step Birthday card was created and thank you for visiting Paper Oasis!
Cindy