Bouncing in with a Happy Birthday

Having just opened my blog I realise that I should have changed my header back to something different by now, but I guess it can wait for one more day.

Today is my grandson's tenth birthday. I do find cards difficult to make for this age when they don't want to be children but they are not quite grown up either. Ollie is a great little swimmer, (and dancer), but he is not into football etc so I wasn't sure where to start. However when I spoke to him on Skype and asked him what he had for Christmas, he said "A pogo stick" so I knew I had my starting pad! I googled 'pogo stick' and found this image which I printed off three times.

I coloured it and cut out the whole image first, and then the tree and bushes from the second one, and the boy from the third. I used distress ink and ink dusters to colour the background layer and the bushes etc, and ciao markers for the boy. I then used sticky pads to layer them all together.

I looked through my papers for a bright and cheerful background and found the yellow stripes with red stars, from a magazine I think, so I used this to cover a white base card. (I actually chose the paper first so I could colour the boy's shirt to match, although it doesn't look as though they do in my photo!). Then I sorted through my snippets for a mat for the image and found a small piece of red that looks as though it came from the same set as the yellow. I only had the one piece, but by removing the centre of the mat, I salvaged just enough to cut out the letters for the Happy Birthday using my Britannia alphabet dies.

Hopefully this will have reached Ollie in time for his birthday today. One of my sons had a pogo stick and they all had so much fun with it, though they do have an element of danger too. usually it was their mouths that suffered on the end of the stick when they fell off, so I hope his front teeth are safe!

By virtue of my red mat and letters, I shall pop over to Pixie's snippets playground to link this up.