Project: Cheerful balloon birthday blog challenge

I've been crafting in the margins rather than making it a priority lately and it's made me a bit sad - I love to craft and love to make time for it but sometimes life gets in the way. Sighs. Anyway - I saw the sketch at CAS(E) This Sketch and thought it was perfect for a play:

I decided to make a colourful birthday card - and although my result is pretty simple I really couldn't decide for ages what to do. I must have looked at every single stamp I have, every die, everything that could be a big vertical feature before returning to one of my first ideas to use a bunch of balloons to form the exclamation point.

The balloon set is Stampin' Up - I used the stamp and punch set to match the colors to the fun paper that I've had in my stash for ages. I love bright printed papers but when they feature text it can be really hard to make it work. Even though the paper is busy it is the paper doing all the hard work and the balloons are all lovely solid colors (punched from paint strips if you want to know!).

The sentiment was an ad hoc stamp purchase I got in Paper Source a while back - it's an older wooden block stamp and therefore makes it a bit trickier to use when you're used to lovely perfectly aligned clear stamps. I am really pleased with it though, it's cheerful and bright but just about unisex...maybe. Pleased I got a chance to play at the desk all the same.