Happy 26th Chris

Today is my lovely son Christopher's 26th birthday: he is now the age I was when I had him!  No, can't be, he's still my baby!!!  Happy Birthday darling, and many, many more.  I made this card and gift card/money holder set for his birthday:

I love making "stuff" for Chris, he understands the work involved in producing something handmade  (he's seen the evidence in my craft room often enough, the "cleaning up" time alone is more than you spend buying a gift!)

On the gift card holder (which this year will hold cash, his favourite) I have used "Sitting Trevor" and the wheelbarrow  from the Sugarplums Take a Seat collection.  All the stamps used on this project were bought from All That Scraps and this set is going in their challenge for this week "make a gift card holder".  It will also go into caardvarks challenge for this week which has the same theme and in  A Spoonful of Sugar's challenge for this week  "Anything Goes".

The card is cream cardstock, I used the sketch from Sketch and Stash, #49 to be precise, for their challenge for this fortnight.  

I followed it really closely, which was easy as it was such a good sketch to work with.  The new "stash" is the "Kiki with Puppy" digi stamp I used on the  card, in conjunction with "Balloon Trevor" who I've used before (on my acetate card, here)
 The group on the card represent my husband, myself and our lovely Rocky, the Jack Russell.  You may notice my husband has greying hair, while mine is a vibrant Reddish Brown - at least that's what it's called on the box! I coloured Rocky to look as like himself as possible, fortunately for me, the patch on the stamp coincides with a patch he has in the same spot - the ONLY patch he has on his whole body!  One of the good things about digital stamps is that you can resize them, and as my husband is exactly a foot taller than me I could make our relative heights more realistic.  Not completely realistic, you understand as he would have been off the top of the card!
The papers are all from the Kaisercraft 6"x6" collection "Le Chateau".  I love them, they're what I describe (to myself, admittedly) as Elegant Masculine.  I mainly used  offcuts for the gift card holder, which I love to do as I can't bring myself to throw them out and I already have a zillion in the folders I keep such stuff in.  I used the template I made which is available on my "Templates, Tutorials and other Freebies" page here. I decorated the back with patterned paper and the inside with plain paper so I can write on it.

Just thought I'd add this photo of Rocky taken at the park (his favourite place) which is why he is smiling, :-)
It was nice to be able to get into my studio (so called because of it's function as the room I use to produce and teach decorative art) and create something - we are so busy with work at the moment it is hard to get time to do anything not work related, the joys of self employment in a seasonal industry!!

There are lots of other things going on too, especially with Chris - changing jobs, moving house - all those high-stress things that cause loving mums to worry too!  Timing being everything, it would have been nice if all the activity could have come at the not-the-silly-season, that's just not the way life works though, is it?  Anyway, as my other son would say, "It's all good". Until next time, happy crafting, Dee