Feeling Blue and Yellow – a Birthday Card and a Congratulations Card

     Hey everyone, how’s it going? Hope you’re all doing well.

     I have two cards to show you today, a birthday card and a congratulations card, that I made during one of my day long card making sessions in the craft room. To be honest, I’m not feeling either of these cards too much but we can’t love every card we make and sometimes we just have to get a card made and sent out the door so there’s no time to revisit it. Such was the case with this blue birthday card I made.

     A lot of things went wrong with this card. I have this large set of stamps with squares, circles and triangles in different styles and I thought it would be cool to try make my own geometric based pattern with them. I wanted it in grey so I used my distress oxide ink because that was the only suitable grey I had but the ink was very juicy on the stamps and also, the stamps seemed very poor quality because they just squished so easily with very little pressure. The ink and stamp quality meant none of my images were crisp. I used distress oxide ink for the sentiment as well. That one worked better (better quality stamp) but still not very crisp.

     For the background, I roughly blended the blue and grey inks together to make my own coloured paper. I wanted to get the cool splattered looked you get when you add water droplets to distress oxide inks, leaving them for a few minutes before lifting the water with a paper towel so the colour underneath where the drops were is lighter. However, the spray bottle I have just covers the entire sheet in a fine mist and when I try to drop water on it myself, I just get splotches that are much bigger than I prefer. Oh well, I needed to make a card with what I had.

     I laid the distress oxide coloured paper onto a blue pastel card base, put the failed pattern paper on top of that and finally used some foam tape for the sentiment. It really just wasn’t working though. Nothing seemed to be sitting nicely with anything else so in desperation, I grabbed a black marker and just started outlining the different elements and I do think that worked. It’s still not a great card but I really think the outlines helped tie it all together somehow. What do you think?

     Onto the second card. With this one, I was trying to make a congratulations card for a new baby to go with a yellow pom pom blanket I had knitted.

     I was really enjoying the tall card bases I have so I went with that shape and chose to cut a strip off the front similar to what I had done with other tall cards. I used an uneven yellow stripe paper for the front of the card with a thin strip of yellow washi tape along the side and a wide strip of wood pattern washi tape on the inside of the card. I think the wood looks nice with the yellow.

     I got a bit stuck with the sentiment though. I really wanted to use this piece that said ‘you can never have too much happy’ but I wasn’t sure how to fit it on the card. I decided to use some grey paper with ‘congratulations’ written all over it to make a banner I could place the sentiment on but I just don’t think it works. Maybe I should have gone with a wood pattern paper to ground the sentiment but I didn’t think of that at the time.

     Oh well!

    If you’re curious, here are the paper packs that the paper used in the above cards came from:

     What do you think of the cards I made and how I tried to salvage them? It’s always a bit annoying when a card doesn’t go how you imagined it to go but sometimes it’s not until you actually start playing with your supplies that you realise things like the two yellow papers you had in mind are actually quite different shades of yellow!

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