A Birthday Sort of Day

Good morning blog readers! Today is a pretty special day around here....it's my birthday!  :)  Which in my books, makes it a fantabulous day no matter what is going on. 

Granted, it is also make and take weekend at Archivers, so I will be spending most of my day at work helping people make Chistmas cards but at least I get to play with scrappy products all day.  Then later on I will be sharing an extra special birthday dinner with my family which should be really great. :)

I also got my very first birthday card for this year, and guess what? I made it. My church sent me one of my  very own creations to wish me a happy birthday.  :) This is the card I recieved in the mail...

Does it look familiar...its because I posted it last month. He-he....my family and I really got a kick out of this one.

So in honor of my birthday, I thought I would share my birthday cards that I made for November. I was able to play with some really cool techniques on these and I absolutely LOVE how they turned out. :)

For this fabulous card, I was able to play with several techniques. I first diecut the label shape from one of the Tim Holtz Alterations dies. I then stamped the branch and cute little owl from Hero Arts onto the label with Memento ink. I also found this great sentiment from Scrappy Cat with little stars in the letters to add to the project. I then colored my card with Copic markers. It turned out really well and the coloring went pretty quicky considering that I colored 40 of these babies. :)  I then distressed the edges with Tim Holtz Antique Linen Distress ink and my ink blending tool.  Finally I stamped this woodgrain stamp from Hero Arts with Walnut Stain Distress ink and pop-dotted the label piece to the card. Definately a card that both guys and girls will love. :)

This next card uses one of my favorite ever Hero Arts stamps...Silhouette Grass. My coworkers think I am crazy for loving this stamp so much but I see *tons* of possibilities here. 

The inspiration for this card came from an SEI paper pack called Charlemagne. The copper and tan combo, highlighted with the turquoise and black accents really struck me as a beautiful autumn color combination and I thought it would translate beautifully into this card.

First I diecut my white cardstock with another one of my favorite Tim Holtz Alterations dies and then I stamped the Silhouette Grass stamp with Versamark and embossed it using copper embossing powder.  I then used Tim Holtz Antique Linen Distress ink and my ink blending tool to color the edges of my image. I stamped one of my favorite birthday sayings from Hero Arts on turquoise cardstock and cut the ends to create the banner shape and pop-dotted this to my card. I still felt that it needed a bit more so I added 3 turquoise gemstones in a cluster to the front to finish my project.  It really was a fairly simple card design and I was able to create 40 of these in just one evening. :)

Well that's it for this post. Hope you enjoyed the cards and have a wonderful day everyone!

Until next time,

Janeen :)