Cards for Mothering Sunday and a 50th Birthday

After making the retirement card last week, I thought I’d use more or less the same design to make my mum’s card for Mothering Sunday and also Wonderwoman’s 50th birthday card, because I’ve got a lot on at the moment and it was really to save time. These cards are not identical, and I have had fun creating variations on the theme, but the colour scheme is the same, and apart from my printer wasting my time by having a hissy fit and refusing to recognise a new cartridge I put in, it was all quite straightforward, if a bit time-consuming. I also had some trouble with Jiminy this afternoon – he kept tearing the things I was asking him to cut, and it occurred to me that he might be complaining that his blade was blunt, so I explored online and found that this was indeed the case, and he was like a new Jiminy after it was done!

I designed a new cut file today, my first leaf trail. On the retirement card I used one of Penny Duncan’s, but I thought it would be nice to design my own, which would fit better with what I wanted to do. Having three strands to it (like Penny’s) but slightly straighter, it means I can cut it up and use the bits if I want to, which is what I did with one of them on the Mothering Sunday card. I have designed it so that the top will be covered by one or more flowers or other leaves.

This file is now available as a free download on my SkyDrive (link on the right hand side of my blog).

This is Wonderwoman’s 50th birthday card.

As you can see, I designed this almost exactly on the lines of the retirement card. As I was running out of black velvet ribbon, I decided to make a bow and attach it to the frame; there was not enough to use for the Mothering Sunday card so I have used something different on that one.

I used Penny Duncan’s cut files for her rose and hibiscus flowers, and also the leaves. The 50 was cut on Jiminy Cricut; unfortunately the gold mirror card doesn’t show up too well on this photo but it is lovely and shiny. I am very pleased with the shadow feature in Make the Cut – I have noticed a few people tend to be a bit heavy-handed with their shadows, but if you cut the shadow at the smallest size, it just gives a tiny edge which I think is fabulous, and gives a lovely crisp look. The shadow in this case was cut from black cardstock, and I used the Poster Bodoni font, which is nice and bold, and a good contrast with the Edwardian Script font which I used for the sentiment in the frame. The underline for that was created using the pen tool in Serif DrawPlus, and saved as an image which can be used again.

Here are some pictures showing the detail:

Here is my mum’s card for Mothering Sunday. I decided to give this a softer, less bold appearance, partly because I didn’t have enough black ribbon, and also because it will be more to her taste.

The ribbon has a solid centre and lovely sheer edges – it is quite fine, and showed up the glue dots I used to anchor it, so I had to be careful to position these underneath where the embellishments would be. Again, I used Penny Duncan’s cut files for the flowers, but this time the leaf trail is my own design.

The font for the top sentiment is again Edwardian Script, and that for the bottom one is Accent. This latter sentiment I cut with Jiminy, using some of the same card as the background, which I printed on the computer, and after it was cut, I dabbed it with Dried Marigold Distress Ink, using a Cut & Dry foam pad (I have a number of these stuck onto the wooden blocks that used to have rubber stamps on them before I unmounted them – I use each one for a limited colour range so that I do not have to keep cleaning them.) The shadow this time was cut from the gold mirror board, and I’m extremely pleased with how this brings out the text but in a more subtle way. After I’d matted it onto the shadow piece, I stuck it down over the leaf trails, using double-sided sticky foam tape for a bit of dimension.

Here are some pictures of the detail:

As before, the leaf trails were stuck down using spray photo mount glue, and the flowers with the hot glue gun.

Finally I inked and stamped a couple of envelopes, as I’d done for the retirement card:

using Dried Marigold and Milled Lavender Distress Inks as before, and finished them by lining them with some paper printed from the same file as the card backgrounds.

I actually feel as if I’m getting on top of my huge to-do list now! There’s a pretty tight deadline on Wonderwoman’s 50th birthday present (her birthday’s on 8th April) and I still haven’t done anything about a present and card for my hubby for our Silver Wedding in May, or his birthday card, which I am hoping will be a mechanical card if I can work out how to do it in time! I had intended to get his old photos made up into CraftArtist digital layouts and made up into photo books for him, but that’s a project that may have to wait a while. Oooooh… time and energy… why are they both in such short supply?