My sister’s birthday is today and the card arrived in time so that she could take it on her business trip. So Happy Birthday Caro, I hope you like the card. After the Painted Petals refused to become her birthday card, I decided to use DSP. Caro loves DSP and she especially loves the retired Eastern Elegance pack. I picked up a pack from the clearance rack recently. After my success with DSP and twine for David’s card (which will be revealed at the end of the month), I decided to try the same kind of thing for Caro’s.

I started by colouring in the stack of presents from the Stampin’ Up! Cool Cat set (retired) using my stampin’ write markers in lost lagoon, soft sky and smoky slate. I then embossed the top part of the image in smoky slate and cut out the top present and popped it up carefully on little pieces of dimensionals. After matting the image in smoky slate, I decided that a larger mat of lost lagoon worked well with the ribbon – the size of the mat mimics the size of the ribbon. I’m not comfortable with big splashy bows especially as this is one of my very first cards with ribbon, so I decided to hide the tails of the ribbon behind the DSP for a more restrained look. I used glue dots to hold the tails in place and then constructed all the layers onto a base of lost lagoon.

Hopefully Caro really likes the card. She will definitely appreciate the fact that I put grey on it; she knows I can’t stand the colour. I should be over it by now, but after wearing grey for school uniforms for about 7 years, I’ve never been able to deal with it. So it was quite a challenge to use it. I think I’ll take Jen’s advice and view it as “matte silver” and actually, I’m really very pleased with this card. Pushing boundaries is definitely a good thing.