80th roses and violets

I always make a birthday card for my other half’s mum and, although I have been tempted to raid my card stash several times this year, this was one card that definitely had to be made specially for the occasion: her 80th birthday.

I’m not keen on cards that shout out the age of the recipient — unless it’s for a young child — once you get past twenty-one, age is often used to make fun of people and the older you get the less you want to be reminded of it. (And personally, my age as a number is utterly meaningless to me, half the time I have to double-check what it is if someone asks.) But equally, there are some people who are more than happy to announce it to the world, and so I had to find a balance: make a statement of it, but in a more subtle way that would satisfy my sensibilities.

My first thought was to find some nice flowers, colour them, then cut “8” and “0” out of the coloured panel and pop them up with some foam tape so they would be raised above the rest of the panel. But by the time I had finished my colouring (Copic with some coloured pencil refinements), I really didn’t feel like taking a scalpel to it and possibly ruining it.

Time for a rethink. After running through a few options, I remembered that I had a couple of sheets of adhesive-backed sparkly acetate (first used on some Christmas cards back in 2015 and then on a 1st birthday card in 2016).

I found a suitable font — always harder than it should be — used my Cricut Maker to cut the numbers out and carefully stuck them onto a piece of pastel coloured vellum slightly taller than the card. Then all I needed to do was to put a sharp crease in the vellum and stick the flap to the back of the card so that the vellum could be flipped up to reveal the flowers in all their glory.

Copic markers:

roses – YG95, RV29, RV66, RV34
rose leaves – R85, G28, G46, G24
violets – BV04, BV13, BV02, BV31, BV0000
violet centres – Y15, Y17, YR04, E0000
violet leaves – B34, YG17, YG03

Derwent Lightfast coloured pencils:

wheat, midnight black, midnight blue, purple, violet

Supplies:

• digital stamps:
  Power Poppy – flower bomb
• embellishments:
  Stix2 self-adhesive sparkly acetate
• paper and card:
  Neenah solar white 216gsm
  Hunkydory Adorable Scorable pearly shimmer
  Anita’s pastel vellum