Sailboat birthday card

October is birthday month-my dad, my MIL and both of my nephews all celebrate their birthdays in Oct.  Dad's is the first and he isn't local so I need to get it and his annual amazon gift card in the mail (he likes strange books-church development etc so I let him buy his own stuff!).  He is actually changing jobs in a few weeks to move to the Coastal Carolina Presbytery (they are in Philly now) and so I created this sailboat card for him... for one, he loves to sail and the house they are hoping to buy is on a lake.  Secondly I felt like it was a way of showing that he is sailing into new possibilities and a new job.  Anyways, here is the card and matching envelope.  There are some issues but it is almost 10 pm, I've had about 3.5 hours sleep (worked last night and then the people came to do insulation at 1:15, then my son got off the bus at 3:45 with a sore throat, earache and a temp of 101.4.  Luckily I was able to get him an appointment at the pedi and he has strep.  Then the dog got into some trash that I left on the back steps and forgot about (some very old meat from the freezer) and is having diarrhea.  So... he gets what he gets!


So first I selected the sailboat and the words happy birthday and had the silhouette draw them with the sketch pen.  I picked black.

Then I unselected those and had it cut out around the card and the sun and the words happy birthday. (I rand out of room on the table and started using chairs!)  DH is taking up part of the table with an antique computer.  Sigh

 

Then, I made sure I could see my mat on the page (go to page view and increase the % on "reveal cutting map" and laid out various scraps of paper.  The blue for the water (the cutter did NOT like this paper.  It's very thin and textured.  The red for the sails and the yellow for the sun.  For the sun, I had drawn a circle around the sun so it would be about the size I needed and then moved it off to the side with the water and the sails to cut out.

 

Then I placed the circle for the sun underneath the card (I love the way the embroidery looks), colored the sailboat in with the kids' skinny markers and glued on the sails and the water.  The water turned out to be kind of a disaster.  I ended up cutting out a set with some white scraps and coloring them with colored pencils because the textured paper tore so badly.  But then as I was gluing the water strips on, I wiped some glue off and it smeared the marker so I had to add MORE water, so I ended up salvaging the textured strips and free handing some. 

For the envelope, I swapped out the bird for the sailboat but forgot that when I copied the sailboat I didn't have the sails turned on to cut.  So I ended up hand drawing them in, and then having to glue paper underneath to make the mast show up... ugh.

So there you have it.  A perfectly ordinary card and a few more lessons learned!