Happy Birthday

Today is my sister's birthday. Happy birthday Chris, I hope you have a good day. This post is just for you. I hope you got your cards in the post, the one I sent you was made in early January when I started on this venture of getting back into creating works of art. But as you will see it was an early example that helped me back on the path of inspiration and design. As my skills have been improving and as my style has been changing and as I have been experimenting with different things, I wanted to make you a new card to show how my craft is varying and how I am modifying my ideas. I have to say finding the world of blogging has helped me too, but the biggest influence has been you. So this is it. I will bring it up to you when I come and visit.

I started with a colour picture from a book of Victorian illustrations and used it as the backing. I wanted to use grungepaper (another new material for me) and used some dies to get the flower shapes.

 I glued some paper from an old copy of Dickens "A tale of two cities" for one of the shapes and used DIs and glimmers on them, putting them together with a vintage brad. For the birthday wishes sentiment I used the frontage of the book and a rub on, I then printed and heat embossed some swirls round the edges which started to melt the rub-on giving it an older look. I didn't have a 'sister' embellishment to fit the bill so I printed this one off on the PC (using Word), used a scalloped punch and, as before, printed and heat embossed some swirls round the edge, again giving it a more vintage feel. The butterfly is one in a collection I have on the PC that I print off when needed and I cut it out, glimmered it and added some sparkle using the glitter pens. Apart from the other little embellishments, I cut out the word inspire on the Cricut, inked the edges and added to dots for the letter 'i' from the grungepaper and bookprint. I wanted this on it to show how much you have inspired me over the years in many ways and particularly with the art and design.  Your creativity is unending, it really is an inspiration to everyone.

Have a wonderful day, lots of love and hugs from both Ken and I and I hope to see you soon.

Brenda xxxx

PS I don't know if this will fit any challenge sites, it wasn't made with that in mind. I will have a look, but haven't seen anything recently.

Well in my search I have discovered -

Practical Scrappers - Rub-ons

Your next stamp challenges - Distressing

My Grafico challenge - Paper piecing

Fab 'n' funky - It's all in the technique  - my favourite at the moment is adding sparkle

Cute card Thursday - Dimensions

Lots to do - Vintage

If the shoe fits - Going green
Creative Card Crew - Vintage/Aged