Happy Birthday Wishes

My mom's 80th(!) birthday is this week, and the school where she teaches is throwing her a party today. One of the guests she invited is a good friend of ours, and I offered to make a card for her to give my mom. I wanted something extra special, so I found this tutorial on Splitcoaststampers.com for a card with a detachable bookmark. My mom loves to read, so I figured this would be perfect!

After I created the card base from teal cardstock, I used my sewing machine with no thread to "stitch" the piercing line to make the bookmark detachable. I matted a piece of patterned paper from Echo Park's "Simple Life" 6x6" pad with green cardstock, and adhered that to the card front. I also matted a smaller piece to adhere to the coordinating bookmark.

Bookmark

To finish off the bookmark, I created a hole reinforcer by punching through a piece of green cardstock with a 1/4" hole punch, then punched around that with a 1/2" circle punch. I cut that in half, and glued it to the top of the bookmark, butted up against the green mat. Then I punched a hole through all layers with my 1/4" punch, & threaded through some fibers from my stash.

I chose the "It's Your Birthday" stamp set from Simon Says Stamp for the greeting. I stamped it in Versafine Onyx Black onto a strip of white cardstock, using my MISTI to help me place the words.

To add a special touch to the front of the card. I stamped one of the flowers & 2 leaves from Simon Says Stamp's "Summer Garden" set (discontinued) onto a scrap of Canson XL Mixed Media Paper. I used Abandoned Coral Distress ink for the flower, and Peeled Paint for the leaves. After stamping, I used a damp paintbrush to blend the color on each piece. Then I die cut them with the coordinating dies.

I glued the leaves & flower to the greeting strip, and trimmed the strip so that it stopped behind the cluster. Finally, I adhered that to my card front, & added some Gold Stickles to the flower center.

Inside of card

For the inside of the card, I cut a piece of white cardstock to 4x5.25". I stamped the same flower & one of the leaves I'd used for the front in the corner, masking to get an overlapping cluster. I used a black fine-tip pen to draw lines all around the panel. I found a sentiment on this website, formatted it in Photoshop, and printed it on my panel. Then I adhered that inside the card, and it was finished!