Happy Birthday Card For My Grandson

 

I don’t know if you ever ran out of ideas of making a card for the man, grandson, nephew, etc. in your life.  Well it happened to me. The next masculine card I needed to make is for my grandson Hunter.  Lots of you know him and know how much he loves to craft.  But one thing you don’t know about  Hunter is that he has been driving those battery operated trucks/cars since he was 2-1/2 years old.  He is now 5 and if he could he would drive any car or truck he was allowed to drive.  And I am not being biased at all but that little boy can drive.  He has a child size 4 wheeler and boy can he go on that thing.  I get so scared watching him.  Of course he is well protected but it still scares me to see him go so fast.  And he helps Pop Pop drive the tractor too.

So I thought I need to make him a special card that I know he thought would be neat (well I am hoping he thinks its neat).  So doing a lot of research and seeing cards my other card maker friends have done for their men I finally became inspired through their ideas and my research.  It took me over two weeks to make this card.  Not because it was hard but because I had to wait for things to dry completely.  And I had to order some embellishments I did not have in my stash.  Below are the photos of the final results and the recipe I used to make the card.  If you are wondering if I had fun making this card well I can say that now that I am done I feel relieved.  I just did not know what I was doing half the time.  So everything was trial and error.  And really had to dig deep in my creative portion of my brain.  I will say this the main element of this card is Aluminum Foil and my personal Cutting Machine.    So with all that said here are the photos.

I used SCAL to draw the card and add the gears border.  The border was welded to the edge of the card so that it will cut out with the gears attached.  Then I took the gears border and re-cut it out of black metallic paper and glued the black metallic border to the white border on the edge of the card (used Neenah paper for card base).  I took  a piece of heavy aluminum foil and used an embossing folder by Tim Holtz called Riveted Metal Set.  I glued the embossed foil to the front of the card.  Once it dried I painted it with Black Paint Dabber paint (I love this paint and so easy to use)  and then removed most of it with paper toweling and left some black in some areas to give it a metal look.  I waited 24 hours for the paint to dry completely. At this time I had no embellishments to add to the front of the card so I cut 1/2” circles and covered the gap between the two embossed pieces to cover the seam.

OK so here is a side view of the card.  I had no clue what I was going to do to the inside to pull the theme together.  So off to the Internet to do some research on how to make aluminum foil look like forged metal.  Well a found a You Tube video on it.  What you do is take a piece of foil larger than what you need and crumple it. But do not crumple it to tightly or it will be too hard to pull apart.  Pull it apart and then use a brayer or something like a brayer (rolling pin for example) and smooth out the crumpled foil.  Once I got it where I liked the look I painted it with more Black Paint Dabber. I wiped the excess off with a paper towel and waited another 24 hours for it to dry completely.  I made another border of gears and glued it to the inside to pull the theme together.  And I found a digital image of a gear with embellishments and the center was left white for my sentiment.  Now how do I embellish the front of the card.  Well I ordered a small bag of Steampunk gears.  Waited for them to come which took a week to get to me.

VOILA!

I found a FREE Font called Gears and cut out Happy Birthday using my personal Cutting Machine.  And added the steampunk gears to the corners.  Even though this card took me a couple of weeks to get done it was all worth it.  And I know Hunter is going to love it!

He better, lol.

Thank you for reading all about how I made this card and I hope that I inspired you in some way.  

Fran