Star Wars Mania Awakens

I think I've mentioned before how I go a little crazy every October with so much stuff going on...hubby. my daughter, and my son in law's birthdays, as well as our wedding anniversary. This year I decided to cheat a little. Since hubby and my son in law's birthdays are only a few days apart... and since thinking up new guy cards makes me stress... and since they're both Star Wars geeks... and since I figured they wouldn't really mind... they both got cards that looked the same on the front.
With all the anticipation and excitement of the new movie being released in December, I thought it would be fun to do a Star Wars themed card.

For the front of the card, I knew I wanted to try to and recreate something similar to the signature scrolling text effect seen at the opening of all Star Wars films. Seemed like it would be a simple enough thing to do, but I soon learned otherwise. The few tutorials I found on the web explaining how to achieve this effect on paper were way too technical for my pea brain (angling each line of text by x degrees and sizing by x points...). In the end, I decided to just place my text into a trapezoid shape, sizing and angling each line to my own liking. Spent way too much time doing this. Not perfect, but good enough for me.
I then used MTC to make a cutfile of this, had my Silhouette cut a stencil onto black cardstock and backed it with some shimmery white cardstock. Found images of the TIE fighter and AT-AT robot online and created cutfiles for those as well.

Now for the FUN part! Inspired by a  wonderful Halloween card created by my dear friend Kris (which I promise to share in a later post), I decided to do a version of Jan Tinklenberg's "Marvelous Magical Marquee Card" on the inside. Unfortunately, still photos can't capture the full very cool sliding effect of this card as it's opened. If you haven't seen this card in action, you definitely should stop in over at Jan's blog, Stamps Paper Scissors to see how this card slides as well as a video tutorial for it.

As this card for my son in law is opened, the "iris" covering the round window slides open to reveal everyone's favorite villain, Darth Vader..."MUAH HA HA HA!"

"30 YEARS OF AGE YOU ARE. WELCOME TO THE DARK SIDE..."

Found the link to this very cool free svg for Darth on Pinterest here.

Interactive sliding cards are always fun to make, but most of the time they are designed to work best with flat stamped images, and not so much with layered paper pieced images. Often I find the sliding mechanisms tend to get snagged or caught onto paper piecings, hindering the slider from working smoothly. For this particular card, I remedied the problem by adding two layers of foam tape onto the background around the image. This kept the slider about 1/8" above the image and the waxy backing layer of the foam tape provided a smooth surface for it to slide open and closed without getting caught.

And here's the inside to hubby's card...

As the card is opened, the iris lens parts to reveal little Yoda...

Got the cutting file for Yoda from the "Galaxy Friends" set over at Cuddly Cute Designs.

Pretty much happy about how these birthday cards for the guys turned out. Even happier still that I saved myself a whole lot of stress by making two cards that were similar, but still different enough for my two favorite guys!