More homemade birthday cards

Here's some more homemade birthday cards and gifts I've recently made for friends.

This one I made for my best friend Amy's birthday. For the paper flower I followed a tutorial I found on youtube (with background music from Emilie Simon which made it even better!), and I then stuck a piece from a broken bracelet in the middle with sticky pads.

I also made some photo-candle-jars or whatever you want to call them using some old photos of us and our friends from over the years which I printed on normal paper in black and white and glued onto a clean jar on top of some old book pages I'd already glued on.  I then tied some cream ribbon around the neck of the jar added the tea lights and voila!  
 

 

That's a photo of the cardamom biscuits we made together in case you were wondering...

It was also my friend Becky's birthday a few weeks ago but because I was away working at the Chelsea Flower Show with work I didn't have time to work on a nice card before her birthday, which I felt pretty bad about. So since we were going to her Dad's birthday this weekend I decided to make them both a card. 

They're both very musical so the cards had to have a music theme. With Becky's I decided to make a heart shape out of a treble clef and a bass clef (I've seen it on a tattoo before and it looks cool) which I made a stencil for and then cut out of book pages (I love using old books for craft projects, in case you hadn't noticed!) and stuck onto some nice red card and added some more book paper to the edges. It was pretty tricky tracing the treble clef and cutting it out so I'm even more proud of how it turned out (even if the whole thing could have done with being a tad more central).

I then cut out a happy birthday message from the remaining red card for the inside, which again I stuck on top of old book pages to make it stand out more against the black card. Ideally I would have liked to have used old music scripts but I just don't have any lying around and didn't have time to go hunting for some.

For Becky's Dad I decided to make a piano themed card from some ideas I'd seen on the internet and this is how it turned out.

 

It might seem pretty simple but it was actually quite tricky making sure everything was the exactly the right size and getting the white keys to lay out right without either overlapping each other at the bottom or leaving really big black gaps at the top. I probably should have made the curve a bit less pronounced, or made the keys themselves narrower, but it didn't turn out too badly in the end. I was going to add in black music notes to the red section at the top but it would have been very fiddly and I didn't really have all that much time before the party in the evening (which was a musical extravaganza itself!). Both Becky and her Dad liked their cards which is the main thing anyway! :)

Right that's enough blogging for one day I think. If you have any comments or questions about any of these cards or the photo jars, just leave me a comment below!

Thanks for reading!

xx