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Monday 23 July 2012

Just A Number

This month's Get Funky! Challenge (as set by Jackie) feels like a particularly bossy one: "use a large number" and "no images of any kind" were among the instructions, along with the basic one to use at least one Funky Hand paper. However, not a bad one for me, as I need to make a couple of 70th birthday cards for men. Not having to struggle to find appropriate images feels rather liberating.

My Funky Hand papers came from the Birthday Dude collection of the Happy Happy Birthday Papercraft Factory CD. I used the sentiment paper (printed full A4 size) for the background and then four of the five woven-effect papers (each reduced to A6 and printed together on a single sheet) for the "ribbons" around the rosette. A bit of purple pearlescent card and pale turquoise corrugate card from my stash added some texture. The "70" (which, I admit, isn't all that large) was stamped in black ink and then heat embossed with sparkly black embossing powder.

The "ribbons" are 8 mm strips of paper, cut to 5 cm in length and stuck onto a circle of card. I thought about inking the edges all the way around them but that felt too fiddly, so I settled for just inking the ends with black after I'd randomly angle cut their ends.

The "Happy Birthday" banner down the left hand side was a last minute addition to cover up where the ink had smudged. I have a feeling that I didn't using the right sort of paper for my printer … but it might just have been that my hands weren't entirely dry after I'd attempted to wash off the liberal coating of black ink that they'd picked up along the way.

The second card, which I actually made first, has - so far - survived trauma by ink smudge, so I've left it without the additional sentiment banner. It uses papers from the "Cake Anyone" collection on the same CD. I think I know which card I intend to send to which birthday boy, but I've got about three weeks in which to change my mind (probably several times over).

Not an entirely successful card-making session, but my first for ages and I'm glad I gave it a go. My inspiration felt a bit slow - but perhaps that's because the English summer has at last arrived and it's about 28°. As well as getting involved in a challenge again and getting these two cards done, it was an attempt to distract myself from the distress of England's abysmal cricket performance at The Oval (which ended in the inevitable huge defeat just after I finished the cards) and the on-going anxiety of whether today would actually (after getting on for six weeks) be the day on which the contract was exchanged on my house sale. The latter didn't actually happen - surprise, surprise: not - but the purchaser does at last seem to have agreed to a completion date, which although far from convenient for me, is probably achievable.

Now I have to face the trauma of packing up my craft stash and putting all of it - bar the essentials - in storage for a few months while the building work on my new home is completed. Nigh on impossible to decide what is and isn't a crafting essential, but I have one fairly modest sized box into which they will have to fit. Trouble is, I had to open at least ten boxes to find the bits to make these fairly simple cards. In the long-term, my new home will have a dedicated craft studio with gorgeous open countryside views so I'm holding on to the thought that the eventual outcome will be worth the not inconsiderable pain and anguish it's taking to get there!