I think I mentioned that I’ve been making birthday cards for people at work. Of course, working in a big IT department means that eventually I’ll be giving out 250 per year but I think I can manage that. If I plan!  Wednesday is Fred’s birthday – he’s on one of my three teams and his buddy asked for a large card. Or two of them. He’s been working at our company for a decade or so and therefore has a lot of friends. So I took a piece of card stock and folded it in half for the card. And realised that it’s hard making a large card – our stamps are not made expecting there to be such an expanse of card. It was a toss up between cup cakes and trees. And as you can probably guess, taking in mind the title, Totally Trees won out.

I started with the ground which I bent a little on the block and then stamped in the middle in old olive. I added more to get to the edges of the card and then used the grass stamp to add a little texture. I then stamped a selection of trees in soft suede and added their splodges in various fall colours. The trees are turning here in New Jersey so it made sense to me to use cherry cobbler, pumpkin pie and crushed curry. My card is “not a patch on New England”, to quote my sister Caro, who coincidentally also used fall colours on her blog today but definitely fall based.

Having stamped my trees the really tough part of the project was looking for the right sized and shaped sentiment. Everything looked too small in the expanse of white space or as if it were trying to take over the card. Hence I’ve used a paper pumpkin stamp from April and nestled it in amongst the trees. The crushed curry enamel dots came about by accident but they improve the card. I had a smudge of ink there and they saved my card!

As I was slightly intimidated by the size of the card, I made my top layer and inch smaller and added a cherry cobbler layer. It makes the card more special, really frames the main part of the card and reduces the available stamping space! A win-win.

This card really started with the envelope size. I checked how large an envelope I could make and realised that by folding a piece of 8 1/2″ by 11″ card stock in half I would need 11″ by 11″ for the envelope. Obviously the DSP is 12 by 12 so I could have gone slightly larger, but that would have meant cutting up a 12 by 12 piece of cardstock for a not much larger card. This is perfect – and uses up a piece of retired designer series paper (Confetti Celebration from 2 years ago if you want the specifics) which happened to be in the right colours.

I hope you enjoyed today’s project. Please use the hostess code to get free product; the current one is GWTDK7RM (if your order is over $150, don’t use the code, you get the rewards, but you still get the free gift from me). Click here to go to my online shop or here to join my team. To sign up for Paper Pumpkin, click here. The “buy 3 get one free” offer for DSP is good for the rest of the month – just a week to go!

See you tomorrow,

Liz