Chinese Lion Dance Celebration

Here's the latest shadow box style card I made, this one for my dear crafting buddy Patti, of Creations By Patti blog who celebrated her birthday last month.

Isn't this paper pieced Chinese Lion the cutest? He's part of the Chinese New Year Chibi collection from SVG Cutting Files. Although Chinese Lions are probably best known for making their appearance during Chinese New Years, they often show up at other special occasions too, like wedding and birthday celebrations to bring good luck. And this adorable little paper pieced Chinese girl comes from Marjorie Ann Designs Kids Around the World collection.

Celebratory Chinese red lanterns hung from the top of the first layer of the card are also from Marjorie Ann Designs. The Chinese gate you see way back on the last layer of of card is a cutting file created in Make the Cut Design program from a clipart image found on the internet. If you look closely, you'll see I added the Chinese characters for "Happy Birthday" onto the gate.

The final touch: Asian architectural corners and border designed in Make the Cut by welding square shapes together.

This time around I used extra heavy cardstock for my shadowbox card. It really made a world of difference when it came time to try to evenly space the layers apart to assemble the card. Lesson learned...use extra heavy cardstock for shadowbox cards.

My sentiment was added to the back of the box. It's nice that this card flattens easily to fit in an envelope for mailing. If you'd like to give the shadowbox a try too, I used the instructional video by Lori Whitlock on You Tube found here as a guide.