Sister Stamps BFF Birthday Celebration

Coming up with a card worthy enough to send to my dear and super talented friend Patti of Creations By Patti for her birthday is always a huge challenge for me. After weeks of scouring the internet for something fresh and new, I finally decided to try the 3-D Scenery Card I saw over at Card Making Downloads. I think I must have watched the video tutorial for this 10 times or more before I finally figured out the mechanics on how this card is put together. LOL, and even then it took me over a week to come up with a working template!

The neat thing about this card is that it's kinda sorta like a box card, but it has a window with shutters that slide open to reveal a scene inside. For the base of my card, I used MTC and tried to create a Japanese style house with shoji doors that slide open. On the outside of the house I used an image of a tree with branches found on the internet and rendered it into a cutfile with MTC. Filled the branches with sakura cut using the Petite Sakuras die from Frantic Stamper. The coolest thing about this 3 x 3" thin metal die is that you can die cut 29 blossoms (4 different sizes) at one pass! I only needed to run it through my Big Shot 5 or 6 times to get enough of the smallest size blossom to fill my trees...great time saver!

On the inside, I used my favorite BFF stamp from Sister Stamps, colored them with Copics and paper pieced their kimonos with washi paper.

The "chochin" or hanging lanterns were created in MTC by welding circle and rectangle shapes together.  I used Copics to color them and ran them thru a crimper to add some fun texture before hanging them onto some black embroidery floss.

Here you can see how the stamped image was adhered to a slider inside the box.

Here's a top view of the card from the front...

...and a view from the back where I added a birthday sentiment. A little hard to see, but that tab towards the bottom of the box is the end of the slider that holds the stamped image on the inside.

Here's the card with the shoji doors closed...

Sliding the shoji panels into it's closed position also collapses the card so it can be put into an envelope. Had fun learning how to re-create this new style of card. Still need to play around and tweak the template for this card a bit more before I try another. Maybe then it can be my new favorite type of card to make!