Cake Is Always A Good Idea

Hello again!  How is it April already??  With the clocks springing forward last weekend, we can look forward to lighter nights and hopefully warmer weather.  No matter what time it is though, cake is always a good idea!  I made this interactive card for my friend’s 60^th birthday and stretched my supplies by extending the cake from Blow Out The Candles into a 3-tiered one.

For my background, I blended Spun Sugar Distress Ink through the Hobbymaker Exclusive All Stars stencil.  If you didn’t manage to get one of these, Drizzle or one of the other cool Visible Image stencils will work perfectly instead.  Without moving the stencil, I applied translucent stencil paste, removed and washed the stencil, and left the panel to dry.  Once it was almost dry, such that it would hold its form but was still a little tacky, I used a dry paintbrush to apply some Pixie Sparkles dust.

For the top tiers of the cake, I partially stamped each half of the cake, masking the other half and the plate.  Once I’d done the top tier, I placed a sticky note over and traced it to make a mask before repeating the partial stamping for the second-tier cake.  I find a stamping platform is really useful for this.  I used a black fine-liner to join up any areas of cake.

I stamped and die-cut the whole cake using the matching dies and then coloured all three cakes with my markers.  For some extra sparkle, I added some Stickles Star Dust over the icing and for the cream, I used Cosmic Shimmer Fluffy Stuff, which expands when it’s heated. The top two cake tiers were fussy cut but I trimmed along the edge of the sponge on the bottom.  This was then glued onto the large cake.

I wasn’t sure how many candles I was going to use so I stamped a die-cut a bunch of them.  A tip for quickly die-cutting the candles is to place the three stamps on an acrylic block and stamp them all together, repeating as many times as required.  Lay the dies over the top of one set and tape them together using low-tack tape.  The three dies are then aligned ready for replacing over the next set of stamped candles.

Since this was for a ‘big’ birthday, I wanted to make an interactive element and opted for a slider.  I positioned the cake on the background, taking into account the height of the numbers, then lightly marked the top of the cake on the background.  Using my craft knife, I cut a slot to house the slider mechanism.  I also die-cut the numbers from Birthday Balloons and adhered them to a strip of acetate as these were to pop-up from behind the cake and I didn’t want to obscure the background.

To complete the slider, I cut a rectangle of white card, stamped the sentiment and trimmed to top into a tag.  So that the elements would pull out to the correct height, I placed the numbered acetate in place and the white tag behind and then added a piece of foam tape between the two of them at the top of the cut-out channel.  Pushing the slider back down until everything was hidden, I then placed a stop bar across the channel at this point. I used the channel cut-out for this but you can use any strip of card.  Once I knew how long the tag needed to be, I trimmed off the excess at the bottom.

The cake now needed to be attached to the background using foam tape.  I positioned the cake upside down and marked where the acetate slider was.  This area needs to remain clear of tape. I put foam tape on the back of the cake and adhered it to the background.

In the same way, the tag needed to be left clear so  I added foam tape all around the tag and then attached the background to the card.

Since I didn’t use all of the candles, I used a couple on the inside together with my favourite sentiment.

To finish the card, I tucked 6 candles behind the cakes, gluing them to the background and adding the 'Happy Birthday' sentiment.  I decided then that the ‘60’ didn’t show up very well so changed it for some Birthday Balloons stamped and die-cut numbers.

Here's a close up where you can see the shimmer from the Pixie Sparkles and the dimension of the 'cream'.

One thing I didn't account for was that it wouldn't be obvious to pull up the tag, since I didn't write 'pull' on the top.  I sometimes forget that, as a card maker, this is obvious to me but isn't to anyone else.  In future I would either annotate the tag or write on the inside - rather than tell them by text message!