A male birthday card with flowers on it?

Hi everyone, Anice here today to talk to you about my struggles with creating male birthday cards. Every year I suffer the usual crafters dread when I have to make my other half, Ian, a birthday card.

Most of my cards these days are pretty CAS (Clean and Simple) as I don't really have much time for crafting whilst running the business.  My advice, if you love crafting never start a business in crafting..you find you get less and less time to do what you love!

Anyway, less of my moaning and back to Ian's birthday card.  I decided I wanted to use one of my I'm A Mug For You digital stamps.  Happy Birthday the Tea Is On Me to be exact.  But that digital stamp has flowers on.. I decided that I could make it more masculine just by the colours that I used for the card and colouring.  Here it is, see what you think?

I used the Happy Birthday Mug digital stamp and papers from my craft CD Colour Me Happy (Jovial Man collection) The base card is black which I think really helps to make it feel more masculine.  Using the workspace on the Papercraft Factory CD I shrank down the polka dot backing paper so that it was pretty small as I wanted a tight spot image.  As I had done that I was able to add the striped backing paper to the same piece of A4 card, so saving card and ink!

Using Letraset Promarkers and Letraset Metallic Markers (My new favourites!) I coloured in the digital stamp matching the colours on the striped backing paper.

 I'm not the greatest colourer in the world but this image is very easy to colour.  The handle and the top of the mug where coloured with the black metallic marker and the flowers with dark blue and green Promarkers.  The little spot highlights where done with a silver metallic marker.  By using colours that match the papers as closely as possible and leaving the rest white I think I got away with having flowers on the mug digital stamp. I decided to cut our the centre of the mug handle to show the paper below.  If I made this card again I think I would cut around the outside of the mug handle and a little of the mug leaving the other side square. I can try that next time!

I cut both backing papers that I used the same length but when I put them together on the card it just looked too simple so, I decided to cut the striped paper into a long banner shape.  By adding a little doodling around the edge it made that section stand out a little more.

 

To make the card I just attached the backing papers to the black base card using Collall PVA glue and added the digital stamp topper using 2mm high double sided foam pads.

So there you are, I created a handmade birthday card for a man with flowers on! You decide if it worked, but I didn't get any negative comments from Ian so it must have been OK!

Thanks for visiting Get Funky And Craft.  If you create anything using Funky Hand products that you would like to share with us, please add them to the link below.  We would love to see them and visit your blog.
Anice xx