What:
My first birthday card of the year and it has to be for a man. As if the mojo-killing New Year’s malaise wan’t enough, I can’t even just sit down and colour some pretty flowers or cute animals. No, I have to come up with a more masculine design. A quick browse through Pinterest and I had a starting point. Then I grabbed a few “could be useful” dies and stamps and I was soon on my way to actually having an idea for a design.
Inspired by:
With its shiny sentiment and background stamping, this was the card that got my brain ticking over.
How:
If I’d had the finished design in mind when I started, this would have been a relatively quick card to put together: a couple of die-cut words, a scrap of faux leather paper from my experiments box, a quickly coloured and fussy cut balloon, all popped up on fun foam over a repeat-stamped background.
But that ignores the different combinations of word dies, in different colours, over different backgrounds that I tried before getting to the finished card. Nothing is wasted though; the die cuts are in my stash and I have a card base with a watercolour background ready to go for when inspiration strikes — in fact, I do believe it will work quite nicely with a Some Odd Girl image I coloured a couple of months ago…
The MISTI came in very handy doing the repeat stamping – it’s not perfect, but it’s definitely good enough and I have to learn to be happy with that.
I used a length of embroidery silk for the balloon string, but first I ran a bit of multi medium matte over it to stop it coming unravelled.
I’m still trying to find the best adhesive to use with fun foam. I’ve tried multi medium matte in the past and it didn’t seem to dry well, though it probably just needed to be left for longer. This time I gave PVA glue a go. I ended up leaving it overnight to dry, which seemed to work well sticking the foam to the balloon; unfortunately it did slightly warp the card base when I then used it to glue the balloon on, so back to the testing lab.
Supplies:
- stamps:
Tim Holtz – birthday blueprint
My Favorite Things – spotlight sentiments - dies:
WPlus9 – happy trio
My Favorite Things – arrow greetings - inks:
Delicata – silvery shimmer - colour:
Zig Clean Color Real Brush – 030 blue, 031 cobalt blue, 036 light blue, 302 haze blue - paper and card:
DCWV – paper pad – foil cardstock – brights
Papermill Direct – super smooth – white - miscellaneous:
MISTI stamping tool
Crafty Rat 
Love your background. That is really nicely done. It works well with the blue focal points. As for glue for fun foam, I tend to use double sided tape or a tape runner. If you use a tape runner, I find you have to put the tape on the back of the image or card base as it’s hard to get the runner to glue. It sticks well though. Hope you get a chance to make some pretty cards soon. Xx
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Thanks! I normally use double-sided tape — like you say, tape runner doesn’t like to be put on fun foam… I was experimenting to see if I could find something that would give me a bit of flexibility, a bit of wiggle room, when sticking a foam-mounted piece down…
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