Paper Seedlings: HAPPY GOLDEN BIRTHDAY

I'm giving you fair warning. This post is perhaps a little over-posted? It is filled with lots of photos of the same card.

You see, my niece/goddaughter turned 22 on January 22. Her Golden Birthday. Since Marissa is a vivacious and sparkly person, I wanted her card for this momentous occasion to be equally vivacious and sparkly.

I had something of an idea in my head beyond the vivacity and sparkle. Nothing too concrete, however.

I wanted the end result to be as glitzy as possible. Obviously. So I dug through my paper stash -- and it is quite impressive -- to pick the best GOLD papers possible.

I'd wanted the overall appearance of the card (without the glitz, of course) to be that of those popular sign boards. With that in mind, I die cut with an old alphabet die set from Stampin' Up! all of the letters and then placed them centered on each of three separate panels.

The three panels, which actually are a brushed metallic gold, were then popped up with Dimensionals atop a very sparkly piece of glitter paper.

Once the basic card was finished -- heavens! it was not blingy enough! -- so I went about embellishing the heck out of the card.

I searched through my extensive stock of embellishments, including shiny gold paper and appropriate punches for this purpose.

In fact, the confetti pieces were punched with a Stampin' Up! punch using snippets from another Stampin' Up! project I had just finished, and dug out of the circular file. Erm. I mean the wastebasket.

It did take me an entire afternoon to plan and put this card together.

For the sentiment inside the card, I used an old Stampin' Up! greeting that I just happen to love to use inside birthday cards. I stamped it in VersaMark Ink onto a scrap of the same paper I'd used for the separate letters, then embossed it in gold.

To punch out the sentiment, I did use a new punch, Label Me Fancy, found in the new Mini Catalog on page 41. This is a punch I can definitely see myself using quite frequently. It's such a perfect size. And, with the punch, you can also add a slit or hole for adding ribbon or baker's twine.

The real reason I ended up taking so many photos of the card is that I was never quite satisfied with how the bling on the card was captured. Never quite good enough. I hope that through an overdose of pictures, you can at least catch a glimpse of just how vivacious and sparkly this card truly is.