Sisterly Birthday Greetings & My First Alteration.....

Fingers crossed this will be live come Monday morning. I am scheduling this in advance as I will be at Mum and Dad's celebrating my littlest sisters 21st birthday today as you read this.

I wanted to share a couple of birthday projects I have been working on for Sophie. The first was a joint project with my Mum. Mum had been inspired by the configuration boxes out there in blogland and that we had seen at a recent craft fair. So we decided to have a go. Mum had a perfect box for the job which had originally housed Waitrose dried fruit and nuts. To cover it we scoured the local charity bookshops for a book of Shakespeare quotations (Soph loves her Shakespeare). Mum tore the book into strips and vintaged the pages up a bit with daubers and antique-y ink and then used these strips (glued with PVA) to cover the box. And then here is where I took over. I poured through all of my embellishments and scrapping bits and bobs to find all the lovely little things to put into the compartments to make it a proper 21st birthday box.

  For all you eagle eyed Stampin' Up! lovers you'll spot all  the SU touches I've managed to get in to these compartments (the key is stamped from Artistic Etchings, a filigree brad, the chipboard birds and a couple of brights buttons). I can't make such a lovely pressie for my sister without a little bit of Stampin' Up! ;0)

This second project is my card for my sister. I picked purple, gold and vanilla as my colour scheme (Soph loves purple). So for this card i combined Concord Crush DSP, Elegant Eggplant & Very Vanilla cardstock, gold and silver embossing powders, basic rhinestones and metallic brads.

I heat embossed 'Sophie' using my Stampin' Up! Broadsheet Alphabet stamp set, Versamark, silver embossing powders (and of course my trusted Embossing Buddy).  I wanted a more higgledy piggledy effect so guesstimated where to stamp without my Stamp-A-Ma-Jig or a ruler. I layered the embossed lettering onto Vanilla which I'd already edged with a gold pen. I punched holes into the four corners and poked gold brads through. I then raised this whole layer onto the main card with dimensionals.


I created my corners by clear embossing the circle pattern stamp from Artistic Etchings onto Elegant Eggplant. I then punched two of the medium sized hearts from the embossed design using my Heart to Heart Punch. I finished off with one of the big sparkly Stampin' Up! rhinestones.  I also gold embossed 4 of the Artistic Etchings keys (I hadnt even mounted this stamp until this week. I never thought I would use it and then my sis turned 21 and boom I've used it 5 times in a few days!) and cut round them carefully to create this corner design.

I even managed to vaguely tie this card into my previous project (purely by accident). I hadn't realised the text on this years Stampin' Up Designer Series Paper is Shakespeare. I typed in a section of the text into Google and it brought up the sonnet that the quote is from. So once again Sophie has a Shakespearian birthday card ;0)

One final photo for more of an artsy angle of the embossed Broadsheet Alphabet.

What a huge photo heavy post! As you can see I have been busy recently.

Hope you are all enjoying your long weekend (and thank goodness for 4 day weeks too....).

Happy crafting ;0)
-X-