Making birthday decorations

Hi Everyone
Very mild day today, our daffodils are peeping through and the sky looks promising for a bright day.


I missed my blog yesterday, too much time spent on having a good time (Im having an 'honoury' (is that a word ?) birthday along with Richard !! Yesterday, we went to the Biscuit Factory ( a great gallery in Newcastle). We go relatively often for lunch and 'a browse' and yesterday there was a new Sarah-Jane Szikora exhibition - great experience looking at these wonderful pieces. If you are not familiar with her work, look Here I love her characters, the pictures have an amusing element but are beautifully painted and the proportions are fabulous. We left feeling hugely 'uplifted'.
I bought a card and am inspired to take elements from her work to develop my own style. This is my card. Many of the characters have large bodies or long bodies with very small heads. The colours are vibrant and often feature 'food' in some way. Fabulous.



Today, is also the second week of my 'Die Cut Friday' series. This week, I'm talking about using die cuts for developing birthday things. Ive made a card and decorations for Richards birthday in this project.



The card is made from a card canvas (A5) - I colour washed it in a blue mix and stamped over using some Tim Holtz stamps. I cut out some card dies and arrow shapes, covered with papers and positioned them over a ribbon. I used the car die and the papers as a theme throughout.
























I made lots of little stamp messages/labels onto simple white printer paper and stuck them on the back of the mini canvas. I also wrote personal messages on the labels. I gave a simple white envelope the same treatment. I like the end result and it all worked out well - no plan at all when I started other than the car die.


As the photos show, I used the car die to make embellishments for the birthday cake. I 'sandwiched' three layers of papers together and glued a cocktail stick in the middle to form the cake decorations. I also created a mini sign, using a Quickcutz die and a mini label. The card car was just two layers as it was stuck to the surface of the mini canvas.

A sparkle candle was used for the singing 'Happy Birthday' event but it was less than impressive. No sparkle to speak of ! I need to complain to the sparkle candle shop. However, it gave us all a laugh - waiting for the sparkler to catch.

Another birthday decoration example is the gift tags. The boys had some simple card die cuts (in different sizes) and I cut out images from the gift wrap paper and stuck them on the labels. I trimmed and angled some of these wrap paper images. I like this to give a slightly 'edgy' feel to the tag and also allows each tag to look 'unique'. I tend to ink the edges, again I think this adds a design element to each tag. Finally, I added co ordinating embroidery thread to attach.





For my tags, I used a different die and used my gift wrap to cut the tags. I used traditional garden twine as my tag attachment.







Having opened all the birthday gifts, Ive used the tags to display as a form of 'bunting'. Kids love this idea and it's a way of enjoying the effort you put into making the tags as well as reminding the birthday person of the gifts and who gave them.






The tags will stay until the birthday 'week' (our agreed birthday time period) is over.

That's it for this week. We have another day of birthday treats (it's only day 3) - not sure exactly whats on today ? Anything will be exciting for me ! I will 'go with the flow' and enjoy whatever's on offer.

Have a great weekend. Bye for now.