International Art and Soul Challenge 33

Our theme for this fortnight is All About Boys/Men. Other than that, your project can be anything, any style, any technique, any colours.

I chose to make a birthday card for my husband who recently had a birthday. His preference is for plain and unadorned, so I mainly stuck to that.

I know it''s a funny angle, but I wanted to show the Happy Birthday.

here it is so you get a better perspective on the image.

The image is from a Pamela West CD Rom from Joanna Sheen. While a lot of those images are very flowery/girly, there are some beautiful landscape type images too. Unfortunately, having come across a blank stepper card while clearing up, and deciding to use it, neither of the papers provided for this image seemed to work for the small areas you get on these cards. So, I took a small sample of the image in a mainly blue and mainly yellow area and tiled thse to get some papers that tone well. I combined the image with an outline and the yellow paper in Photoshop Element and added a bevel to give better definition before printing. I then die cut a greeting (not sure whose die that is), and my husband's name (using a XCut die) as well as a fairy cake (Marianne die, I think. It's pale blue.) I added a little shimmer (and colour) to the candle flame and shimmer only to the icing using Crafter's Companion glitter pens.

Now, a question. I often see this style of card being made, and I just wonder how people post them. (Obviously not an issue in this instance.) I rarely make this sort of card because I find that the varying thickness of parts of the card when folded leads to the card being warped and looking quite tatty. And that's before you compress it to any extent. So, do people make boxes for these cards? Or do they unfold them out so they're rectangular, leaving the recipient to work out how to display the card? (I know that easel cards can be a puzzle for some people, so could only imagine what they'd make of one of these unfolded. I used to make birthday cards for people at work which were passed around for signing, and with easel cards, I was often taken aside by one of the people signing it to warn me that the card needed mending. It didn't - it just wasn't obvious that the design was intended.)

Any ideas/suggestions will be welcomed. I do like this style of card, but unless I solve this issue, I doubt I'll be making many of them.

I do hope you can join us this time.