Beloved, I only love thee!

Sharing a card I made for my manager to celebrate his recent engagement, featuring a Some Odd Girl image called Best Man.

We all know guy images don’t sell as well as female ones and inclusion is only slowly seeping into the crafting world.  Luckily Kristy does some awesome male images and this one didn’t even require any merging!  I did trim the hair off both though as my manager and his fiancé have shaved back and sides.  I also did this image twice as the first time I didn’t do enough internet stalking to realise which of the couple were taller and I had the dark hair and beard on the wrong one.  It was a good mistake in the end though as it meant that I switched out the colourful image for a black and white one, which I think suits my card more.

I wanted to make the card elegant as my manager isn’t over-the-top camp and also wanted it to be special given this isn’t a simple, once a year event of a birthday.  The gate fold prompt at Back to Basics and Beyond was enough to inspire some creative, layered die cutting.  Combined with the optional twist of a shaker card at 613 Avenue Create! and suddenly I had a great base for my image.  What I didn’t have is any engagement sentiments, not a stamp or a die in sight with the word on it.  I did find two lovely sentiment stamps though and used one in my shaker window and one on the inside flap.

For a bit of interest, I did my shaker sentiment in red ink, which I then embossed in clear embossing powder.  To echo the ‘wishes’ of the sentiment I used some glitter, seed beads and tiny sequins in white and clear for my shaker.  I also added one of the gorgeous chippies from Make it Crafty just to fill some of the space on my designer paper half of my card, without adding anything too girlie or fussy.  Again, I used red and black, but as the background was black, I did the shadow in red and the top layer of the chippie in black.

Over at Crafty Cardmakers they have a 3-2-1 recipe theme going.  I have three sentiments, two stamped ones and the chippie one.  My two element is dies, the edger and the shaker frame.  Finally, I have one image although technically I have two of the one element as I also used only one designer paper.

This card took me a while as I struggled to come up with any ideas given the limited number of images available and some of the really tacky things I’d seen on Pinterest.  But once I looked over the challenge blogs and got some inspiration there it came together quite quickly and I am really pleased with how it turned out.

Ingredients:

Copics

W00, W0, W1, W2, W3, W4, W6, W8

Chalks & Powders etc

Stampendous! Embossing Powder ~ Detail Clear

Dies, SVGs & Templates etc

Uniquely Creative Dies ~ UCD1765 Stitched Scalloped Circles

Whimsy Stamps Dies ~ WSD418 Envelope Edgers

Embellishments

Make it Crafty Chipboard Single Layered Words ~ XOXO

Sequins & Seed Beads from stash

Inks & Paints etc

Stampin’ Up! Stampin’ Pad ~ Basic Black & Real Red

Papers

Bazzill Card Shoppe Cardstock ~ Marshmallow

Bazzill Prismatic Cardstock ~ Black

Making Memories ~ Wedding

Tim Holtz Idea-ology Kraft Metallic Cardstock ~ Silver

Stamps

Altenew ~ Beautiful Inside (hearts)

Some Odd Girl ~ Best Man

Stampers Anonymous Tim Holtz Collection ~ CMS182 Random Quote

Stampin’ Up! ~ Dandelion Wishes (sentiment)

Challenges

613 Avenue Create! #221 ~ Anything Goes w/Optional Twist: Create A Shaker Card

Back to Basics and Beyond #27 ~ A Gate Fold card

Crafty Cardmakers #233 ~ 3-2-1

Thanks for stopping by!