Two for the younger males of the Perry Tribe.

While I was busy with our visitors last month, one of our grandsons celebrated his thirteenth birthday. I had a card ready and posted it to him but didn't find time to post it on here, so here it is.

He is an ardent Dr Who fan so choosing a subject for his card wasn't too difficult. As this was an anniversary year for the program, there was a lot of stuff in the internet, and some while back I downloaded all the parts of a Dr Who blog hop, which together made a fairly comprehensive digital scrapbook kit. So in Adobe photoshop I started with one of the backing papers and added the letters, the Dalek and the Tardis at the bottom, and a badge and sentiment at the top, (the font was included in the kit). I printed it out and cut it into sections, sticking them top and bottom of an A5 white card. The section across the centre is a cutting file posted by one of the kind folk on the Silhouette Facebook page who generously share files they have designed. It depicts profiles of the twelve faces that have played the Doctor. I thought it was quite clever, so I cut it from black vinyl and transferred it to the space between my paper layers. I printed a second badge and embossed it with clear powder before sticking over the original one.

Next week it is our little great-grandson who has a birthday and he is three already! So for his card I looked through my digi-stamps and found this little bear singing along with his mice friends. He came from Di's Digi Downloads. When I had printed it out and cut my card to size, I made a mask from copy paper and dusted the whole background with Distress inks, squeezed lemonade and scattered straw. Then I coloured the image with copic markers. For the sentiment I dusted a small off-cut of white card and used an old stamp by Butterfly Kisses. I dug out a set of pens called Emboss. They have very 'wet' ink in strong colours, and were sold specifically for colouring a stamp for clear embossing. I have had them for at least eight years, and I was amazed to find they were still all working. So I used a variety of them to colour my stamp, embossed it with clear powder and cut it out. I matted it onto red card and cut it out again. The balloons are cut from tiny snippets of vinyl using a file I had in my silhouette library. At the last minute I made one larger and cut it from metallic vinyl and added a gold number three. I arranged the balloons along the top of the card, cropping them along the edges, and used a fine marker to draw in the strings.

The sentiment strip and balloons used up some snippets so I am going over to Pixie's Snippets Playground #138 with this one. (Sorry the photo is a bit pale. It is much more colourful in real life. It was very sunny and I was trying to get the metallic sheen of the red balloon to show. I didn't realise it had made everything else looked rather washed out!). But Hey-ho, You can't have it all ways.