Happy Birthday, Sys!

My little sister (somehow calling a 12-year-old as a baby sister seems really odd, it's not like she's anywhere near a baby! Well, she's not that small either...) had a phase when she loved wolves. So when I bought her a book on them as a present, I naturally wanted to make the card to fit the theme.


I cut the card blank from a handmade cardstock with black wood chips (or something similar). In my opinion it looks just like snow scattered with spruce needles. I cut the wolf photo from the back cover of my previous year's calendar, it was just the right size for the card and nice and heavy and glossy, like a real photo. My first idea was to mat it centrally onto a square of blue paper, but when the photo just happened to twitch from its original accurate position, I liked the "scattered" look better. It's actually a lot harder to place things haphazardly than according to some regular design and achieve a natural look.

To balance the bottom half of the card, I took a round blue pre-die-cut (now that's definitely not a word!) tag, but it didn't look quite right. I inked the edges, but it wasn't enough so I mounted the tag onto a piece of silver gift wrap and cut out the excess, leaving a thin border. The tag alone couldn't balance the bigger squares on the upper half, so I took a piece of blue ribbon left over from gift-wrapping, cut slits with craft knife to the tag and threaded the ribbon through them. I mounted the tag with a foam pad, but I don't have the faintest idea what I did to the ribbon ends as the card is one-sided... I guess I glued a panel of plain paper on the back of the card (I guess you can't call it an insert as there's no inside...). The peel-off numbers were actually in italics but I didn't want them that way, so I twisted them a bit when mounting and got this funnily wonky 12.