Avery Elle birthday card

Hello everyone, and a very warm welcome to Donna from the Crafty Colonel blog who has joined us as a new follower. Donna is on a number of Design Teams and enjoys waterclouring and making scrapbooks as well as cards. She makes a ton of cards for Operation Write Home and I'm sure you will get lots of inspiration from her blog.

I'm sorry to have been absent for so long but I am still in the throes of reorganizing my craft storage and the weather has been too nice to spend it cooped up inside, so I have been playing hooky. I am more than halfway through and have purged enormous amounts of patterned paper and other craft items that I'm pretty sure I will never use again. Of course now I have got rid of it you can guarantee that I will soon need just the item I have disposed of. At least I will know what I've got and where to find it now though, so it will be well worth the work, and I have learned a valuable lesson about using new stuff when I get it rather than hoarding it for some special project that remains only in my imagination!

I've been missing creating though, so I sat down today to mess up all my good work and made my first card for the Make the Day Special Challenge #4 which asks us to take a card from the first year we blogged and CASE it.

It turns out that I started blogging in April 2010 and it certainly doesn't feel like I've been at if for more than 4 years because I still feel I'm learning so much. They asked us to show the card we are CASEING and I decided to use this card from June 2010.

I was surprised to see this card because it is very close to my current style and I mistakenly thought that I had 'evolved'! I decided to take inspiration from the central matted panel and from the upright part of the trees that are like stripes. One of the things I have learned since 2010 is to be a bit more adventurous with colour so I wanted to add colour in my new card. I used the Avery Elle Brushed set that had not yet seen ink and came up with this brighter one.

I just stamped the smaller brushstrokes with the different colours and overstamped the happy birthday greeting. This panel was passed through my Ebosser with the PTI canvas impression plate to add some texture before being matted onto the pink card. I then used a tiny tag from Papertrey Ink and stamped the 'wish big' and bow to go in the top corner after I tied it with some twine. The panel was raised from the base card with pop dots to give some dimension, and I finished it off with a few little hearts which I coated with some Wink of Stella glitter.

In case any of you who live in the UK have not yet discovered Make the Day Special, they are a small company that brings lots of American stamps over here and makes them accessible to us without the costly postage and import duties that are involved in buying them direct from the Companies themselves. If they don't have what you need in stock they will try to get it for you and I recommend that you try them.

I got my colours from this inspiration picture

over at Curtain Call, so I'd like to wish them Happy 1st Anniversary by joining in with them for the first time.

And finally, as the current challenge over at 

Seize the Birthday

is to add twine or string, and I didn't feel my card was complete without some, I really want to play along with them.

I hope you are having a wonderful weekend and thanks for stopping by.