Tuesday, July 13, 2010

So Much For Productivity!

Well, friends ... My post on Sunday showed a card I made in less than fifteen minutes. You'll now see one that took several hours!

Egads, so much for "productivity"!

Today, I just wanted to stretch creativity -- and come up with a birthday card to meet a particular need I have.
Annually, one* of my very best girlfriends and I swap birthday cards during our August birthdays. Joan and I haven't seen each other in years, but every time we do see each other, we pick up right where we left off as if our last sentence was just spoken.

Our birthday cards are usually crammed with a long personal note in which we catch each other up over the happenings in the past year.

So this year, I decided I'd create more of a package for that note and I came up with this little pocket card.


I cut the card from a sheet of 12x12" white paper. Then, I used K&C Company's Citronella pack for the floral design in yellow and pink. The paper is two-sided, with the lime green leaves on the reverse. The complimenting checkered paper came from a Kids' stack in my stash.

I lined the pocket with yellow cardstock onto which I printed the sentiment on the left, and I printed the "Make it a spectacular year" on plain white cardstock. For the cut "Happy Birthday" sentiment and the cut flower, I used Cricut's Calligraphy cartridge. I embellished with Basic Grey's appliqued flowers and an additional fussy cut flower from the Citronella paper.


I had a little trouble cutting the very thin "Happy Birthday" from the sturdy paper. The letters kept breaking and the Cricut blade dragged the paper. To solve this, I LOWERED the pressure, reduced the speed, and used Cricut's multi-cut feature.

Now you might ask, "Ellen, just how long did it take you to figure out how you wanted to make this card?" Well..... the baseball All-Stars' game went on TV at about 8 p.m., which is when I went upstairs to craft. It took through several innings. As I'm posting this, the National League is in the lead. It's 11:15 p.m. Time for bed. Yup. One card ... 3 hours.

And that is a labor of love! Happy Birthday, Joan!
(*My girlfriend Joan doesn't yet know about my new card making hobby, so I'm revealing her card here prior to her birthday. To my dear friend Star who reads this blog and who also has an August birthday, you'll have to be surprised!!)

1 comment:

Purple Scrapbooker said...

What a happy card! Sometimes they just take forever, but it sure was worth the time you put into it, it looks great!! TFS

Jen
purplescrapbooker.com