Let's Have a Party!

Aren't birthday parties a great time of celebration.  Whether celebrating yours or someone whose dear, it's just fun when those who are special gather to celebrate a birthday.  My sons are two weeks short of being exactly 3 years apart.  So their birthdays came very close together and we always made that two week interval a time of constant celebration.  We just rolled from one birthday into the second one.  I loved that and my boys had a blast making the celebrations last that long.

I had a request from one of the design team members to create a set of birthday owls.  What fun!  I just took three owls from my Owl Always Love You Outline set, and the birthday hat and confetti outlines from Time for a Party, recolored them and created an entire color coordinated ensemble. I have 3 samples that will highlight something from each new set.

This one features a bingo card from the Hard Rock Candy Bingo Plus set (see all sets used at end of post).  The owl, confetti, and sentiment are from the Birthday Hoot Bundle set, and the digi paper layer is from the Hard Rock Candy digi paper pack.  I used Island Indigo cardstock for the card, Pumpkin Pie cardstock to mat the image piece, and Whisper White to print all the digi elements.  The entire card only took one piece of white cardstock.  Here's my layout.  Each piece is sized to exactly what I use on my card, so there is minimal waste.  Using good, high-grade cardstock is important.  I've found that Whisper White is smooth, allowing the color to saturate the surface.  Cheaper cardstocks will make your images look grainy.  Of course, all printers are different so there can be some color variations when actually printed.  My HP printer is just about dead on from what it looks like on my screen.    

My second sample is a part of a fun challenge hosted right now at

 Just Us Girls.  

I just love their site.  The design team is full of wonderfully unique inspirations.  They offer a different challenge each week.  Here's their schedule of challenges.

Week 1 - Sketch
Week 2 - Technique
Week 3 - Color
Week 4 - Photo Inspiration
Week 5 - WILD card!

Challenges go live on Saturday, so this week is the sketch challenge.  Here's the sketch.

There are some adorable samples on the Just Us Girls blog that you really should check out.  Here's my submission for their challenge.

 

This card features more of the digi papers and elements from the Birthday Hoot Bundle set  (images and sentiments).  Here was my worksheet, again printed on Whisper White cardstock for crisp images and truer color.  

I absolutely love the versatility of digi stamping.  I can use exactly what I need for a card, which conserves paper and ink, making digi stamping very affordable and user friendly.  I could have made the owl image the size of the entire sheet, and it wouldn't pixilate at all.  In fact, let me prove that point!

I can just see this as part of the birthday banner!  In real life, he measures about 9 inches tall and 6 inches wide.  That's definitely something to hoot about!  I digress, thinking of yet another project!  Back to my challenge sample.

Once printed, I just cut the piece out, punching the hat and owl with a 1-1/4" circle punch.  I used the 1-3/8" punch to make colorful mats in red and blue, then punched scalloped circles to contrast.  One of them is punched from the square of red on red polka dot digi paper.  The sentiment is simply matted to adhere to the challenge sketch.

My third card showcases one of Helen's Journal Mats. If you haven't seen her collection, you should take a look.  Her kits are perfect for scrapbookers, or using them as a card starter as I did here.

I used the star paper from the Hard Rock Candy Bingo Plus set.  You get three extra color coordinating papers with that set.  Helen used the striped digi paper in the Hard Rock Candy Digi Paper pack to create her composite image.  There are 14 sheets in that pack and the 3 in the bingo set gives you tons of papers to choose from.  All the papers are generic, so they can be used for any occasion.  Here's my worksheet for this card.

Normally I would try to fill in the white space you see with other digis to use later, but I didn't want you to get confused with images I didn't use.  You can see the journal mat is flat, so to add dimension I sized another owl to match the one on the card, cut it out, and popped it up over the original owl.

In this view you can see how the owls layer on top of one another.  The top owl goes over the ribbon just so all of him shows up.

For a little extra embellishment I put rhinestones in the center of the brads from the bingo set, and a clip I had in my stash.  I use ribbons a lot too so I had one that was perfect--pumpkin pie--to match the cardstock base.

I hope these samples get you in the mood to party on!  You might also check out the Owl Always Love You sentiment set.  It will give you more flexibility in the nature of your celebration, and you can color those sentiment to match these sets in most photo editing programs.

And here are the sets debuted!

Birthday Hoot Bundle (images and sentiments)

JPEG and PNG / 300 dpi

15 color images and 20 sentiments

$5.00

 Hard Rock Candy Bingo Plus

4 Color Bingo cards, 4 brads, 1 flower, 3 digi papers

JPEG and PNG / 300 dpi / resizable

Hard Rock Candy Digi Papers

14 sheets / 12 x 12 / 300 dpi / resizable

$4.00

 Birthday Hoot Journal Mat Kit

6 mats / JPEG and PNG/ resizable

$3.00