Flying By To Wish You Happy Birthday

In about an hour I'm going to head out the door to my Thursday night writers group, but I wanted to get today's craft posted first. Just in case any of you out there are wringing your hands in anticipation. Lol.

My son Chaztin has a birthday party to go to tomorrow night (a bounce house party -- how fun is that?!) so rather than going out and buying a card, I decided to make one. I think it turned out really cute. What do you think?

So, the inspiration for this card was the ribbon. I found it today at A. C. Moore for a dollar, and I just loved the vibrant colors and pattern. It seemed almost like little traffic signals or something. I remembered that I'd bought a baby stamp set a couple of weeks ago that included an airplane, so that's the direction I decided to go in.

I wanted the colors on the card to really pop, and the best way I know to do this is to use black cardstock as a base. The trouble with black cardstock is that it has a tendency to look really flat. Clear (or black on black) embossing is a great way to solve this problem. Listen to me, I sound like an expert! Well, I do watch a LOT of how-to videos...

Anyway, I was going to use my wood grain background stamp (currently my ONLY background stamp) but it just didn't seem to go with the theme. So I decided to look through my little stack of $1 studio g stamps I've been picking up, and found this little swirl shape. It's actually from the same little stamp set as the owl sentiment I used earlier this week. I stamped the swirl all over in versamark ink, then sprinkled it with clear embossing powder and took my heat tool to it.

I knew I wanted to use this cloud paper behind the airplane, but I needed some more color. I just happened to have a sheet of multicolored striped paper, and the bottom three stripes were the exact colors I needed to bring out the ribbon -- red green and blue. I centered the cloud paper from the top, and the striped paper from the bottom, overlapping just a little. Then I tied the ribbon over the seam and adheared with a mini glue dot under the knot to keep it in place.

Next, I brought out my new favorite tool, the blender pen! It's really just like a clear magic marker, but you can use it to pick up ink so that you get a nice soft effect. I stamped the airplane in StazOn ink to make sure it wouldn't bleed, then used some Colorbox chalk ink. I just dabbed the ink pad straight onto one of my acrylic blocks (used with clear stamps) and picked up the ink using the brush tip of the blender pen (I first used the fine tip -- that didn't work well). Make sure you have some scratch paper nearby to rub some of the color off and also to clean your blender pen between colors. All you do to clean it is scribble on the paper until no color comes off. You can see I tried to do a little shading. I still have some practicing to do.

To add some dimention, I popped off the airplane strip (actually watercolor paper, though I think white cardstock would also work just as well since there's no actual water involved) with dimentional adhesive.

Normally, I just leave my cards blank so that the person (or myself) who will be giving it can write their own sentiment inside, but since this one is for my eight-year-old to give, I figured I'd just write something for him so all he has to do is sign his name. I cannot write straight to save my life, so I again used one of my acrylic blocks as a guide, just underneath each line I was writing. Worked like a charm! The pen I used was a Signo Broad white gel pen, which is the one recommended my Kristina Werner on her blog (see link on sidebar). I bought it from a website called Trendy Right Now for $2.99 with free shipping. I even paid via paypal.

So that's the craft for today! I hope you enjoyed it and are feeling inspired to go out there and get your craft on!