Happy birthday...

to me! Yep, it's my birthday today. So to celebrate I made a birthday card for myself! In case you are wondering, this is not a *big* birthday, but next year it will be. I'm thinking maybe this will be my last birthday since I'm not so comfortable with the number my age will start with next year. I'll just stay put right here, or can I even roll back to the previous decade? ;)

OK, enough about that and on to the card. This week the Our Creative Corner gals have a new monthly hostess, the fabulous Silke Ledlow. Silke has given us a fun sketch challenge so I hope you'll play along. I couldn't help fiddling with it just a bit... hopefully not too much!

Since this is a card for me, I decided to bring out some retired stuff that I love but haven't used in a while. I picked baja breeze and kiwi kiss for my colors, with basic gray as an accent - the colors in some of my favorite SU paper ever, Urban Garden. My DDIC DT member Kerri used this flower from Bella Blossoms in her card on Thursday and she inspired me to get it out today. I also loved how she put beads in the center of the flower, so I wanted to find some way to decorate my flower, too.

I first stamped the flower in baja breeze and kiwi kiss. The leaves were stamped on the whisper white base layer and then I stamped the flower three times on white scraps and cut out the various layers of the flower. I put the three layers together with dimensionals.

For the background I used one of the Urban Garden papers in baja breeze and one of the Bella Rose papers in kiwi kiss. To divide the two I punched a strip of kiwi kiss textured cardstock with the eyelet border punch and layered basic gray satin ribbon on top. The sentiment from A Little Birthday Cheer was punched with the modern label and layered with Movers & Shapers.

Now, for the decorations... this kind of evolved as I went. I started out using glitter on the flower, which I thought looked good. When everything was put together I needed something else to add a little pop - it was pretty but somehow it didn't look done. I turned to the rhinestone stickers from the Eggcellent Eggs kit - these are so awesome! I hope we get them by themselves in the next catalog. I started adding two of the largest ones to the sentiment. Then I felt like the card needed to have rhinestones somewhere else, so I had the idea to add them to the holes in the punched border. I think it looks so cool. But when I went to take a picture of the card, it looked bottom-heavy with all the rhinestones on the lower half. So I went back and added rhinestones over all of the glitter. I really think it was worth it!

So, what am I doing for my birthday? Well, Todd has to work at least part of the day so I'll probably take the kids to the mall. That's something all three of us usually enjoy, although you know I won't really get to shop for myself like I might if I were alone. Tonight we'll go out to dinner and Todd is supposed to be supplying me with some kind of birthday dessert, which will of course include chocolate. And after the kids go to bed I'm hoping to share dessert and drinks with a couple of the moms from my neighborhood. It'll be a low-key day but I hope a fun one!