TMR 141 | Birthday Turtle | Our 7th Birthday

The Male Room is turning 7 years old, and we’re celebrating! With this month being our birthday month we of course wanted to have a birthday theme, and we’re also honouring the occasion with a prize. In fact, with two prizes! Sarah from Funky Fossil Designs is generously offering a £25 credit to her store to our first randomly drawn winner, and a second randomly drawn winner will receive a £15 credit to the shop courtesy of The Male Room‘s admin, Jane. All you have to do is create a masculine birthday card and link it up with us here.

As Funky Fossil Designs are sponsoring us I decided I would use one of their products to create my card. I was lucky enough to win some stamps and stencils from them a while ago, and had yet to use this Turtle, so I thought I’d give it a go. (You can see a couple of projects I’ve made with their products here.)

I started with a white card base and used some pieces of wide washi tape to mask off the outside edges. I used the lines of my craft mat to help me with the alignment, and masked off a half inch on all sides. I then took a regular width washi tape and masked off a strip about a third of the way up, cutting through the rectangular I’d created with my initial masks.

Before bringing in my stencil I wanted to add a soft base layer of colour. I chose Catherine Pooler’s Aquatini ink which is a really beautiful colour. I used a make-up brush to softly apply it, with the colour more intense at the edges of the masked area. Once I was happy with it I treated the card base well with anti-static powder before proceeding.

I positioned the Turtle over my card base and began selective applying embossing ink through my stencil using a Scrapbook.com Clear Stackable Sponge Dauber. Usually when I heat emboss stencil designs I just press the ink pad directly onto the stencil, but as I wanted to be selective about my inking the dauber was the better choice. I applied the ink only to the turtle itself, leaving the water/bubble areas without ink.

Once I was happy with the coverage of the ink I removed the stencil and added Oiled Slate embossing powder which is from the WOW! Trio Dockside collection. I brushed any excess powder away with a paint brush, then used my WOW! Dual Speed Heat Tool with the hotter setting to melt the powder.

Next I carefully lined the stencil back up onto the card base. This was fairly easy – I just picked one of the large areas of the turtle to line up, then checked against another space to make sure it was properly straight. Once it was correctly in place I again used a dauber and this time applied the ink to the water/bubble areas of the design. I then applied Glassy Ocean powder, from the same Trio set, and heat set. Having completed all the stenciling I removed the masks from my card and set it aside.

I decided I wanted to use a die for my focal point, and picked out a hooray die which is a retired MFT dienamic. Any large word die would work for this, of course. MFT has some great options here. I cut the die three times from white snippets. I then got my sponge dauber out again and added embossing ink to the top portion of one of the cut out words. I heat embossed that with the Glassy Ocean powder before adding ink to the bottom half and heat embossing with the Oiled Slate.

I used my Nuvo Smooth Precision Glue Pen to add adhesive to the layers of my hooray and stacked them together. I of course completed the stack with the embossed version of the word topmost. I then used the same glue to adhere it onto my card base over the horizontal strip that had been masked off.

As a final touch I bought in some Sea Breeze Nuvo Drops and added a trio of them to my design, forming a visual triangle with them around the focal area of my card.

I really enjoyed making this card. This was one of the occasions where the finished design actually did turn out pretty much how I’d imagined when I was starting, which doesn’t happen very often. I think it’s really quite striking for actually being pretty straightforward to make. It certainly helps to have such a beautiful stencil and fabulous embossing powders to work with!

I hope this inspired you to come and play along with our challenge. Don’t forget that by joining in you’ll be entered for a chance to win one of the prizes. If you’d like more inspiration you can find lots of great birthday card ideas from the team on the challenge page, or directly at their blogs via the links below.

Love,

Lady Joyful

*Affiliate links may have been used in this post. For more details on affiliate links as well as other ways to support me, visit this page.*

Challenges:

Allsorts Challenge – Make It Masculine

CAS(E) This Sketch – Sketch

Creatalicious Challenges – Anything Goes

Double Trouble – Embossing

Dragonfly Dreams – Anything Goes

Kat Scrappiness – Birthday

Simon Says Stamp Monday – Happy Birthday

The Male Room – Birthday

Through The Craft Room Door – Anything Goes

WOW! Monthly Challenge – Masculine

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Check out what the rest of the DT made:

Andreja

Clarissa

Faith

Goga

Granne

Helen

Lady Joyful (that’s me!)

Lise Mariann

Ma-Mi