Lantern Birthday Card

 Today's card is one I recently created for my mother in law's birthday. I knew I wanted to go with an Asian theme so I pulled out some of the Spellbinders Destination China dies I had purchased a while ago, together with all shades and textures of red and gold papers and cardstock I could find in my stash.

I really love the intricate dies in Spellbinder's Destination China collection, and although I have used the Traditional Fence dies often, this was the first time I used the Lantern set. I wanted to try to include all of the Chinese lanterns in the set on my card, but knew my card would have to be rather large to accommodate all three lanterns. 

After a little experimenting, I realized that a Double Z style card could be sized perfectly to fit all three of the beautiful lanterns. I used Stardream gold cardstock to cut the borders, the Chinese character "Shou" (for longevity) and the Traditional Fence panel. "Happy Birthday" was cut from an Elizabeth Craft Designs die.

Lanterns were die cut from metallic gold cardstock and backed with pearlescent red Stardream jupiter text weight paper. Red glitter cardstock was adhered behind the gold Traditional Fence panel.

The first lantern was attached to the front panel, and the remaining two lanterns were adhered to strips of clear acetate and "hung" on the struts inside the "box" of the Double Z card.

I found room on the back panel to add our sentiment and birthday wishes. I really enjoyed  playing  and experimenting with re-sizing the Double Z style card to meet my specific needs. Sometimes you can come up with some interesting variations just by increasing or decreasing the height or width of  a card template by half an inch or more.

What a CAT-astrophe!

 After making the masked Daniel Tiger card to send to our granddaughter (in my previous post), I wanted to create something similar to send smiles to some friends whom I've missed getting together and spending time with this year. 

I came across some handmade cards on Pinterest using  a clever play on the word "catastrophe". Then of course my favorite cat, Hello Kitty came to mind and I figured together this might be a cute idea for a card.

Just as with my last card, I used  a cutting file for the mask from the "Shelter In Place" file from Little Scraps of Heaven, sizing it to fit Miss Hello Kitty, then welding it into a round window for the front of the card.       

Cutting file for paper pieced Hello Kitty was created in Make the Cut design program from a coloring book image. 

Cutting files for the thermometer and caution tape as well as the printed virus image in the speech bubble are also from Little Scraps of Heaven's "Shelter In Place" file.  An icon symbol of a pump bottle found on the internet was rendered into a cut file to create the antibacterial bottle.

Just learned recently that we need to be sheltering in place for at least another two weeks in our area. I'll be mailing half a dozen of these cards to friends this week, hoping it might help to bring a little bit of cheer...

Staying Safe With Daniel

Yikes! Our city and county is back on lock down due to a  recent rise in our Covid 19 positive cases. All of this was getting a little depressing so I decided to cheer myself up by making this fun card; hoping it would also bring a smile to our little 3 year old granddaughter whom we're really missing a lot these days.
 

The idea for my card comes from some of the cute and clever pandemic greeting cards I've been seeing a lot of on the internet recently which feature a masked happy face. Since this card was to be for our granddaughter, I swapped the happy face with a face that I knew would be more familiar to a preschooler... can you guess who it is?

Open the card to see the face behind the mask is none other than PBS Kids' Daniel Tiger! In case you're not familiar with him, he's the same Daniel Tiger that appeared as a puppet in PBS's Mr. Roger's Neighborhood.  He and all the rest of the puppets (and even the red trolley!) from that program are back on PBS as a delightful animated cartoon for children with all the wonderful songs from the original show. 

The paper pieced cutting file for Daniel was created in Make the Cut design program using a coloring book image found on the PBS Kids website. For the front of the card, I used the mask from Little Scraps of Heaven Shelter In Place cutting file, which was welded into the round window shape.

Grassy border was cut using a Die-namics die and flowers and leaves were cut using Punch Bunch mini punches.

We've heard our granddaughter isn't always cooperative with her parents about wearing a mask to keep safe, but perhaps her favorite Daniel Tiger can be more compelling?