Graphic happy birthday

This is the last of the regular cards I need to make for my side of the family until September; it’s a small family with no birthdays over the summer. Though I’ve just remembered that that is going to change as my eldest nephew and his girlfriend are expecting a couple of additions in a few months. But I’m getting sidetracked. This card is for the other nephew; he’s nineteen this year and I really don’t know enough about his interests to make a targeted card, so I went for bright, shiny and graphic instead.

I wanted to make card with “happy birthday” filling the card front — along the lines of the background for the dino birthday card I made, but more random — and I wanted to make it as a cut file so I could cut the elements out with my Cricut Maker.

I could have created a design like this from scratch but I was a little short on time (no surprise there) so I went looking for something to use as a starting point… and found some chocolate. I used Affinity Designer to create a version of the layout that would fit onto a rectangular card front, tweaking the shapes to fill the space in a way that I was happier with, and adding the exclamation mark to fill the bottom right corner.

Then it was “just” a case of choosing some card colours and cutting it out. I could have split the design up and just cut the happy out of gold card and the birthday out of red, but it was easier to simply cut the whole design out in each colour. Apart from anything else that gave me an extra set of words to create a second card with — this one I made with a shiny purple background.

In fact, I ended up with another two cards by using the leftover piece from between the letters. And, I got to use up a couple of pieces of patterned paper in the process.

So, I ended up with a card for my nephew, three birthday cards for my stash, and an easy to make design if I should need another birthday card in a hurry in the future.