Birthday Card Making – Paper Smooches Nine Lives Stamp with Lawn Fawn Hello Sunshine Paper Birthday Card Idea

My partner’s father also has a birthday in March. March seems to be a popular month for birthdays. This is great as it’s forcing me to make some birthday cards! But I was stuck for ideas. I really felt as though I had exhausted my creativity. After a little sook and throwing my papers in the air in an overly dramatic display of exasperation, my partner come over to the table and sat down and started playing with the supplies while giving me a pep talk.

I had just finished cutting out a little cat in a bit of a play pose and was starting to cut out another one while I was racking my brain for ideas.

My partner laughs and I look up at him and he’s says simply, ‘look he’s playing with the birds’. His innocent view on life and the boyish cheekiness is why I fell in love with him. I couldn’t help but laugh and smile. He thought I was laughing ‘at’ him initially, but I was so amazed that he had come up with such a great idea for a card. He was really chuffed that he’d actually come up with a great idea so he gave me a kiss then went back to his video games. Anyway, that’s how this card design came about!

While he was at work the next day, I started to piece together the card. I decided that it’d be great to have a whole lotta sparkle and wanted to go over the white pattern paper with the wink of stella pen. And ooops! I squeezed too hard…

Luckily I had a second piece of the pattern paper with the birds on it so I tried again. The first piece was already adhered so I cut an eighth of an inch off each end of the second piece and adhered it with foam tape to give the card a bit more dimension.

So sparkly!

For the sentiment I white embossed ‘you are’ and ‘loved’ onto a scrap piece of orange pattern paper. The sentiment stamps are from the Simon Says Stamp ‘Thinking of You’ stamp set. The inspiration for placing the ‘loved’ sentiment over the ‘you are’ sentiment comes from Vicky Papaioannou. I adhered the orange pattern paper with foam squares and used a Derwent Studio pencil to give a touch of shading to the playful kitty.

I am really pleased with the simple clean look of this card and my only input was to put glitter all over it. ^-^

Birthday Card Making – Paper Smooches Nine Lives Stamp Set Birthday Card Idea – Cute Happy Cat Stamp

My partner’s younger brother has a birthday in March and I wanted to make him a super cool card.

If you’ve been following my posts, you’ll have noticed I use the Paper Smooches Nine Lives Stamp Set and the Paper Smooches Spectrum Stamp Set with the Lawn Fawn Hello Sunshine pattern paper quite a bit. This is because I’m on a budget so I can’t buy all the new trendy items every week. I save up and a make a purchase of the items I need (with a couple wants mixed in hopefully) once every couple of months. I prefer to buy online and have the items shipped out. I’ve had the best service from http://www.123stitch.com and they have very reasonable shipping costs from US to Australia.

With all that said, I tend to make alterations to an already tried idea to try and make something new and unique each time while using minimal supplies. I love the adorable happy cat stamp in the Nine Lives Stamp Set and I thought, the more the merrier!

So I stamped (using tuxedo black memento ink) the cat twice on the orange pattern paper and once on a scrap piece of grey pattern paper with the idea of creating three cats. I stamped the mouth area three times on plain white card stock.

Using memento ink markers I shaded the tongue and mouth with black and red and then I fussy cut the three mouths out. I adhered the cut out mouths on top of the two orange cats and the one grey cat. I fussy cut the cats out and shaded them with Derwent Studio pencils. I went over the outline of the cats with a tuxedo black memento ink marker. I accidentally made a mistake on one of the orange cats so in attempt to fix the mistake, or camouflage it, I drew lines to create a striped cat.

I gathered together some scrap strips from the Lawn Fawn Hello Sunshine paper pad.

I arranged them on the card and adhered them slightly askew to give the card a more fun and casual flair. I trimmed the excess with scissors.

When I was arranging the kitty-cats onto the card I found I wanted to have the grey cat slightly higher than the others, but it looked odd to have him sort of floating on the white pattern paper. So I cut a little scrap of blue pattern paper to place behind the kittens so that it looked as though they were sitting on a mound or cushion. Now all that was left was to stamp a sentiment! I chose the ‘you’re awesome’ sentiment, I stamped it onto white card stock and then drew a speech balloon around it. I fussy cut the balloon out and then using the memento ink marker, I traced the edges and drew a border. I adhered the speech balloon to the card using foam squares.

I was very happy with the final result. I wasn’t able to see my partner’s younger brother for his birthday but my partner informed me that the card was a smash-hit success!

Birthday Card Making – Paper Smooches Nine Lives Card Idea – Vicky Papaioannou Inspired

I was really enthused after creating the cute happy cat birthday card for a friend, inspired by Vicky Papaioannou. You can check that post here. And I wanted to try something along the same lines but shake things up a bit to create something fresh. There are quite a few of my friends with birthdays in March so I thought it’d be a very practical idea to get a head start on creating some cute cards for these friends.

Keeping with the cute cat theme, I chose a different cat from the Paper Smooches Nine Lives Stamp set. I stamped the cat with tuxedo black memento ink on to a scrap of grey patterned paper from the Lawn Fawn Hello Sunshine collection (my go to paper stack for birthday cards – I think I’m going to be sad when I run out).

With so many cards made using the Lawn Fawn Hello Sunshine papers, I had quite a few scraps left. So I gathered a few to coordinate together. The rainbow strips were already cut into workable strips so I didn’t have to alter those at all. The larger pink strip of pattern paper I used the Fiskars scalloped border punch on the long edges. And the yellow paper has ‘Hello Sunshine’ with a sun as a striped pattern on the paper so I cut two thin strips between the lines of ‘Hello Sunshine’ from a larger strip of scrap pattern paper.

To the larger pink pattern paper with the scalloped edge, I created an embossed background. The inspiration from Vicky Papaioannou starts to become evident in this step. I wiped down the paper with an anti-static pouch to prep the area for embossing. I used the range of smaller catty item stamps in the Paper Smooches Nine Lives stamp set stamped where I could fit them using Ranger’s embossing ink. I used white embossing powder then heat set the powder. Just like in the previous card, I used stickles on the bottles to create interest.

There was a gap left at the bottom when I was creating the embossed background, mostly because I had smudged a fishbowl and had removed it. I wasn’t fazed as I had planned to place the cute kitty cat at the bottom in that area anyway. I decided to use the ‘you’re purrty’ sentiment stamp and decided where I wanted to place it by using the clear acrylic block with the stamp clinging to it.

I decided to keep the sentiment simple and stamped it using tuxedo black memento ink onto plain white card stock. I trimmed the cardstock down and then adhered it to the card using foam squares. I decided to add a little shading to the cat as well using the Derwent Studio pencil in Gun Metal Grey.

I was really pleased with the final result and I can’t wait to give it to the birthday girl!

Link to Vicky Papaioannou’s Clips-n-Cuts website; the inspiration for this card:

http://www.clips-n-cuts.com/2013/03/how-to-video-and-giveaway/

Birthday Card Making – Paper Smooches Nine Lives Card Idea – Vicky Papaioannou Inspired

This card I made for my cowgirl friend’s sister. They both have birthdays in February. Similarly to the previous card post, I was strapped for time and so once again fell back on Vicky Papaionnou to inspire me with her creations. This was another card I’ve been wanted to make. I didn’t have the ‘My Minds Eye’ paper pack that Vicky uses but I still had my go to papers, the Lawn Fawn Hello Sunshine 6 x 6 paper pack.

I really liked this card because it was simple and came together really quickly, but as well as that it was a way to use up some scraps that had been accumulating. I used a scrap piece of grey pattern paper with a polkadot pattern and stamped the adorable cat stamp from the Paper Smooches Nine Lives stamp set. I shaded him using my Gunmetal Grey Derwent Studio pencil. I stamped the cat again onto a scrap of white card stock and used Memento ink pens in black and red to colour the mouth and then I adhered it. He’s so cute and happy!

Using some scraps I had a wider piece of blue pattern paper already the perfect size for the card. I cut two strips of the yellow ‘hello sunshine’ paper and then using the Fiskars scallop border punch I punched a scallop border on two scrap strips of pink pattern paper. One of the borders I punched wonky, but it’s not to bad and the other side the punch had a hiccup and so a bit of the white paper showed through. I used my finger nail to tuck it under and hide it away after it was adhered to the card.

Speaking of adhering things to the card. I had to use black card stock as I have run out of white card stock but I think if anything the black enhances the colour as they’re so drastically bright in comparison and so the colours really stand out, in my opinion.

Once I had it adhered down I used Rangers Heat It Embossing Ink and I stamped the milk bottles, fish bones and bowls onto the blue strip. I possibly should have done it in sections as I was having trouble seeing where I had stamped, and better yet should have done it on the blue strip before adhering it on the card as I heat set some spots onto the black background of the card accidentally, but I that’s all hindsight and I was rushed! I used WOW white embossing powder and the Heat It Craft Tool to emboss and heat set.

Once the embossing was complete, including the sentiment ‘have a purrrfect day’, I used some stickles glitter to fill in the milk bottles. I cut the sentiment into a ribbon shape (I can never get the triangles equal) and then I adhered the cute kitty cat and the sentiment ribbon using foam squares. I was super pleased with the outcome and I really love the look of this card.

Just like the previous unicorn card, I’d love to recreate this card with a few variations. If struggling through my mistakes, this was a fun card to make.

Link to Vicky Papaioannou’s Clips-n-Cuts website; the inspiration for this card:
http://www.clips-n-cuts.com/2013/03/how-to-video-and-giveaway/