December Birthday

We always celebrate Bill's cousin's December birthday at Christmas, so in addition to all of the holiday cards I also had to stamp a birthday card this month. Bill asked me very nicely not to make it too feminine, which meant that I had a challenge in front of me because masculine cards are definitely not my specialty.

First I had to choose a color combination. I wanted something a bit muted, so I settled on bordering blue, bravo burgundy and more mustard. Then I needed a stamp set that wasn't too feminine. Initially I was thinking about using the Happy Birthday wheel with the Eat Cake set, but when I looked into my jumbo wheel storage box I saw this All About Birthdays wheel and figured it would be perfect.

I used my bordering blue classic ink pad to ink up the wheel. Since the card is only 5.5" long, I knew I could get away with using a color that I didn't have in a cartridge. I simply had to re-ink the wheel between wheeling the two rows. Just a couple of passes of the jumbo wheel and I had the perfect background on my bordering blue card base.

I then used my stamping write markers in bordering blue, bravo burgundy and more mustard to ink up the candles from the All Occasions stamp set and stamped them on very vanilla card stock. I made sure to clean the stamp between each impression as I had to alternate the bravo burgundy and bordering blue candle color. I also cleaned the wheel and inked up just the happy birthday sentiment in bravo burgundy to stamp it on very vanilla card stock. To see a tutorial on how to get this done see this post. I added more mustard and bravo burgundy mats to both the main image and the sentiment and adhered them to the card base to complete my card. Fortunately, it passed Bill's "masculine card" test!