Boys Boys Boys

This month's Get Funky! challenge from Funky Hand is "Boys Boys Boys". Cards for men are almost universally held to be the hardest to make but with two male relatives having birthdays in the next few weeks, this was a timely challenge for me. As usual, the wonderful Anice provided a fabulous freebie paper and, although there is no obligation to use it, the colour and pattern combination made it irresistible.

Learning from my experience with this week's Docrafts Creativity challenge, I decided to go for simplicity in design but also to have another go at using the previous unfamiliar combination of squares and circles. The colours of the freebie paper came from the Jovial Man collection on the Papercraft Factory Colour Me Happy CD and I chose another pattern from that as my second paper. After that, it was simply a matter of cutting out squares and circles, inking their edges (obligatory!) and matting them onto complementary card. Anice had included stars on the freebie sheet and although I didn't use those, I liked the idea (and sentiment) of including a star so punched one out of card, inked it, topped it with a button and stuck it on. I was very glad to find that I had just the right colour of ink and style of stamp for a casual "Happy Birthday" greeting, using another of the collection's papers. The wooden mini-peg was not part of my original design but, having found it in my button box, it seemed to provide a slightly quirky yet appealing embellishment. Albeit one that's not necessarily going to travel well through the mail …

Pleased with how the finished card looked, I made a few more along similar lines using other patterns in the collection. Although blue and green is a combination that's not "supposed to be seen", it's one that I've always really liked, being based, it seems to me, on prolific colours in nature, and certainly works well for men. Thanks to the Get Funky! design team for the inspiration; that's my male card needs sorted for now and a few more to come, which is a great relief. Lots of female birthdays coming up at the end of the summer: any chance that next month's challenge could provide a useful starting point for them?