One of my aunts, is turning 90 soon, and I decided to make this card for her. As a bonus the card fits the current challenge at: The Sisterhood of Crafters – Strips and/or Dots. As you can see, the candles show both stripes and dots, but the PP also has them in its design.

I did consider making a card that incorporated 90 candles, but discarded the idea due to the thickness and cost of mailing one that is oversize. So instead I used the double Z fold technique and added 9 candles to represent 9 decades. The stamp used is an old (very) Hero Arts wooden block and I found it isn’t stamping well so I shall be discarding it. That said I got a good enough impression to use for this card although I did have to use a sharpie to fill in edges. After stamping enough, along with a few extra just in case, I coloured them using pencils, Sakura Gelli roll pens and some Perfect Pearls for additional shine. Took a while to fussy cut, but cutting mostly straight lines isn’t hard.

Using some GKD CS, I had prepared my card base and added some PP, the music panel is from a napkin, the back panel is StampinUP DSP that had a shade of the same colour blue as the card base in the design and the other PP was gifted to me a long time ago and I think is from Michaels. The bottom is the Z fold strip after I had added the PP to it. Glued all the candles down as you see and checked the folding to ensure no errors. Of course I found a big one so a little bit of cursing was in order. I had to get very creative to fix it. What had happened was that I used both sides of the white CS to stamp the candles because the first try didn’t get good results. Figuring mistakes wouldn’t show once they were glued I stamped again on the other side. On a different design this this wouldn’t have been an issue, but I forgot that when the card is folded the backside of the candles shows and it was ugly. Fixing it required stamping another 6 candles onto white CS, fussy cutting and then adding them behind the glued ones. A little bit more cursing to get them glued, but it worked for the most part. I decided not to worry about perfection so while still not pretty, it’s a lot better than it was. If I do another card similar to this I will ensure that both sides of the stamped image are the same. My hands didn’t like the effort though and I’m paying for it now.

With a leftover piece of the blue CS I die cut the sentiment letters using a Scrapbook.com set of alphabet dies and glued them along the bottom deliberately skewing them slightly for a fun look. I felt it needed something on the last piece so I used a Forever in Time dollar store set, stamped the star and fussy cut it before adhering as you see. I’ve created a white piece for the back of the card so I can write a personal message, which will include an explanation for the quantity of candles.

All in all, I’m pleased with the end result and shall be mailing it tomorrow morning. Thanks for stopping by, your time and you are appreciated.