Count The Good Times

My card this week was a commission from a lovely lady who wanted a special card for her Mum’s 90^th birthday.  The brief was food, fireworks and celebrations!  For the food element, I used Visible Image’s Blow Out The Candles stamp set.

At first, I stamped just one cake but I thought it looked a bit meagre for a celebration cake so I got out my stamping platform and did some partial stamping and masking to create a 3-tier cake, drawing in the centres and bottom edges with a fine liner.

I coloured the cake with Copic markers before fussy cutting along the lines and then I went around the edge with a black Sharpie.  To make the cake even more celebratory, I added Nuvo glitter drops all over the icing for some sparkle.

Next, for the background.  The fireworks were created using the Paper Rose Fireworks stencil and a combination of Distress Oxides in Picked Raspberry, Salty Ocean and Mustard Seed.

Since this was a very special card, I thought a slider card would add some extra wow!  After watching a couple of YouTube tutorials, I set about making the mechanism.  I tried to use some clear packaging for the slider but it was too rigid so I used a section of thin carrier bag instead, which worked well.  Since I wanted the fireworks to be visible behind the ‘90’, I mounted the numbers on a piece of acetate.

After stamping ‘Happy Birthday’ repeatedly over the fireworks, the assembly of the card began.  I attached the mechanism with some foam tape along the side, to allow the acetate and numbers some room to move.  It was at this stage that I realised that the pull tab needed to be longer so had to do a little modification!

For a base for the cake, I thought a gingham tablecloth would be lovely so I used the Stampin’ Up! Buffalo Plaid stamp for that.  The tablecloth also gave me the space to put ‘MUM’ which I cut using Julie Hickey Sweet Pea Alphabet dies and I punched a semi-circle from the bottom edge so that the pull tab could be accessed.  The cake was attached to the top and then the whole piece was attached using a double layer of foam tape. The cake was decorated with fussy-cut candles and the card embellised with some enamel stars and hearts.

The card with the slider pulled...

Here's the card in action!