I had a friend's birthday party yesterday so I'd decided I wanted to make her a card rather than buy one. Now before anyone gets the wrong idea, I'm not a compete stingy miser, I'm just trying to be a bit more careful with my money right now, and I personally think the greeting cards that you can buy in the shops are a complete rip off, and I don't know many people who actually keep them, so it's not very environmentally friendly either.
I'd had a couple of ideas in my head of what I wanted the card to look like roughly - quite simple but vintage colours and style as my friend is quite stylish and artistic (her and her partner run a photography business and she is also a trained make-up artist).
This is what the final product looked like and here's how I made it.
After having a quick look at some magazines for references, I decided to use up some of the book pages leftover from the book I made for Tom (there's a reason I can't throw anything away), to create a nice background on top of some nice black card, which I made by cutting strips of text out of a couple of pages, and then glueing them down with pritt stick. I didn't want them to look too straight and tidy, so I just used scissors rather than the stanley knife. When I stuck them down I didn't glue all the way to the edges as I wanted the edges to curl up slightly to give the effect of being aged.
I then made some paper flowers to sit on top of the book page strips - I did this by cutting out a medium sized flower outline in some dusky pink paper, and then used that cut out as a template to cut one exactly the same in the same paper. I then used some patterned reddish paper and cut out individual petal shapes (with tabs on the bottom so I could stick them down) and glued them on top of the pink flower outlines with pritt stuck.
After that I sewed on a nice pearlized button in the centre of each flower. To get it right in the centre I placed the button on the reverse of the flower and pushed a pencil through the holes to mark where the needle needed to go through the paper.
I had some more patterned paper which I cut into strips to make the flower stems, and once I'd decided where I wanted to stick the flowers I stuck down the strips and glued the flowers on top. Once they were stuck on I used my fingernails to bend the petals into a more 3D shape.
To finish it all off, I just sewed a border around the front of the card with plain white thread (running stitch) which looked really nice against the black card. The whole things was a little rushed because I hadn't left myself much time and I needed to get on with baking for the birthday party, but I actually don't think it would have looked much better if I'd had the time to complicate it by adding in more elements - I think the vintage feel patterns and colours contrasted nicely with the simple black background and overall it had a nice collage effect.
Most importantly my friend really liked it so overall it was a success - I just wish I'd made two cos I want one now!!
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