Aloha, all!
One of my neighbors is having a milestone birthday today and his wife asked that I make a card that was "fun," but all black and gray. How the heck do you make "fun" out of black and gray?
Well, you have to go looking for stamps that have "fun" written all over them! And Stampin' Up! has a bunch of those to offer. In fact, there are FOUR sets that are represented in this card: the Big Bad (not!) Bear is from the set, Under the Stars; his fun balloons are all made from one stamp in the set, Crazy for Cupcakes; the greeting at the bottom is from Bring on the Cake from Stampin' Up!'s 2011 Occasions Mini Catalog; and the bear's little party hat is from the set, Beary Best Friends (originally made for bears, but not this big guy – the Build-A-Bear Workshop bears!).
To make this card really pop, I embossed all the "gray" images with Silver Stampin' Emboss Powder. The bear and his Basic Gray muzzle and belly are all cut out and mounted to the card front with Stampin' Dimensionals to give the card some texture. I would like to have used a texturz plate to emboss the whole card front; but this card is a large one (5-1/2" wide x 8-1/2" high) and the texturz plates aren't quite big enough. As I was on something of a deadline, I decided to forgo that and just move on with the card.
The paper that I used in the balloons is some Basic Black from the Neutrals Patterns Pack of Designer Series Papers. Great designs this year, as always! To make the inside of the card, I cut an 8-1/2" x 11" piece of one of the Basic Gray sheets from the Neutrals Patterns Pack and printed the customized message on that paper before cutting it to fit just inside the card, adhered to the inside with a bit of Stampin' Up! SNAIL mono adhesive.
There's nothing complicated about this card, but I thought I'd share the basic layout since this card is larger that the cards I normally make. Unfortunately, Stampin' Up! no longer carries an envelope that will hold this large a card. But there are plenty of 6" x 9" envelopes to fit this card – called "catalog" or "booklet" envelopes – available anywhere stationery is sold.
I hope you've had time to make some of your own cards or scrapbook pages this weekend! And I certainly hope you had as much fun as I did making this card for Jim!
.jpg)
