Birthday Cards Day 1

Hi Everyone!

My daughter, Marie, will turn 23 this Saturday. In honor of her birthday I have decided that each day this week I will post pictures of some of the birthday cards I have created.

Ever since she was a little girl Marie has always loved presents and always wants her presents to be wrapped. Years ago I started to wrap Christmas gifts from Santa in Santa paper and gifts from Mom and Dad in a different paper. I also wrapped even the tiniest stocking stuffers before I put them into everyone’s stockings-that was a HUGE mistake. About a year or two ago I thought that neither of my kids would mind if I stopped wrapping the stocking stuffers. WRONG! Both of them were big time disappointed, so I am back to wrapping everything for all occasions.

In honor of Marie’s love of presents I created a card for her that looks like a present. I plan to put a gift card inside of the card so it really will be one of her presents. I used "Polka Dot Basics" from PaperTrey Ink to stamp the background onto the card and gift tag. There are 6 varieties of polka dots in the set. I used Jeanette’s (from Stamped Designs in Dover, NH) technique to make the bow for the card. It was an easy card to create.

My "Happy Bird-day to You" card is adapted from an idea in one of my favorite papercrafting books, Treasury of Tips & Tricks from Paper Crafts Magazine & Stamp It! Paper Crafts magazine is my FAVORITE papercrafting magazine. I also purchase and love their special issue magazines and own and treasure all of their other books. Visit their web site and sign up for their blog. You’ll learn about products and get ideas for your own papercrafts. Visit Moxie Fab World and read Cath’s incredible blogs. Cath is the Creative Editor for Paper Crafts magazine. Cath has another blog called Cath, ETC. That I also love to read. Her writing makes me laugh, cry, nod my head in agreement...She’s an incredible writer and an incredibly talented papercrafter who must be a total blast to know.

Oh, wow! I have so many things I want to tell you about and so many birthday cards to share with you. I promise that not all of my blogs will be this long. How about one more for today? Well, sort of one more as the cards are all basically the same. I found the 3D Crayola embellishments that I used on these cards in the Dollar section at Michaels. There are 8 layered embellishments in a package. The embellishments are a little flimsy and are meant for a child to use, but they totally work as embellishments for a child’s card. I used my 1.5" circle and my 1.25" square punches to make the backgrounds for each embellishment. The "Happy Birthday" message you see stamped on each card is a stamp from Hero Arts. It fits perfectly on a 1.25" square.

Okay, that’s it for today. I appreciate the comments that you have been posting. Please feel free to post questions too if you have any and maybe I or one of the other readers can answer the questions for you!