Birthday Card for my hubby

The cards I make for my husband each year are ones that I really sweat over!  I want them to be perfect because I know that he really treasures the time and creative energy that I put into them.  They frequently have an oriental theme, because he's Chinese.  And I really do love working with oriental papers and embellishments, and then combining them with more traditional papers and elements.  I'm very contemporary traditional!

So here is this year's birthday card. And it really does combine the oriental and traditional.  I went out on a limb with the metallic copper paper, because he is not a big fan of browns, but I love it, so I went with it.

I picked three background papers from 'the Natural Stack' by Die Cuts With a View (DCWV). I have quite a few different 'stacks' by DCWV because they make high quality papers and I just really love the papers they put out.  Then I added some copper sticker stripes along the borders of the papers so the transition from paper type to paper type didn't look so odd.  The copper stripes are kind of like those transitional strips between carpet and hard flooring in your house!  And all of these beautiful copper foil papers were really just a background for the tiger scene I got from the "Japanese Design" book and cd from DoverPictura. I printed out the tiger and then mounted it on the paper I used for the skinny stripe, which is very subdued. And for a little more bling, I added some orange crystals in the corners.

Then for the inside. I used two of the three background papers from the front as backgrounds for the bamboo, round grasses and sentiment.  The bamboo and round grasses were done with metal templates that I have.  For color I used a variety of green inks, starting with the lightest colors and ending with the darkest colors. 

The sentiments I found in my stash somewhere, but I didn't like the paper or font that had been used.  And I wanted to combine a couple sentiments.  So I went to my trusty Print Shop Pro program from Broderbund and created my own sentiment with exactly the fonts I wanted, the size and shape I wanted and on the paper I wanted.  And I must confess, I do this a lot.  I'm really starting to play around with mixing fonts, bolding certain words, and layering words over top of each other.  I use the heck out of that program!  And I do occasionally update to a newer version because I like it so much.  

Then it was time for a few last embellishments.  The copper hexagons I cut out one by one from background paper. Honest! The orange bamboo stickers I took out of my stash.  And just so folks would know, including my hubby, that bamboo is a sign of vitality, I included then little 'vitality' sticker too.

And voila! There you have it.