Beer bottle & balloons

The youngest of my brother’s two sons turned twenty recently so I had to make a card for him. Because it’s a “big number” birthday, I decided that I needed to put the number on the front, but I wasn’t sure what to do beyond that. There isn’t really a default masculine card type; at least for women you’re unlikely to offend anyone with flowers.

So I went browsing for inspiration. Someone on Etsy was selling custom cards with a name spelled out on a row of beer bottles, and I did consider doing something similar but didn’t fancy having to colour six beer bottles… Instead, I settled on colouring one larger bottle with his initial on it and attaching balloon numbers to it with some perle cotton. I created the bottle in Affinity Designer on the Mac and die-cut the numbers with my Cricut Maker. The numbers were based on a Balloon Letter Alphabet I bought on Etsy, though I did have to edit them to make them work as cut files.

I heat-embossed a sentiment from an old stamp set by My Favorite Things (Spotlight Sentiments) across the bottom of a pearlised card base. I glued the bottle flat on the card base and then popped the number balloons up on two different thicknesses of foam tape so that one could float in front of the other.

Digi stamp design, Copic colouring, Cricut cutting, stamping and heat embossing; this birthday card has a little bit of everything. Except stencilling, I could have stencilled a design over the background if I’d thought about it at the time…