Archery birthday card

Hi Everyone! Today I’m going to be working a very long day, but it’s also one of our placement student’s birthday, so I’m sceduling this post to go live after we have given her her card (hopefully – don’t let me down technology!!)

Her family live in Wales, so she learned Welsh and she competes in archery for her University team, so I wanted to combine these two things to make a truely personal birthday card for her from all of us.

Firstly I wanted to have an archery target on the front of the card, but I didn’t want all the circles to sit one on top of the other, I wanted them flush, so I die cut circles from coloured card using my Spellbinders dies and then had to try to line up the smaller circle on the middle of the circle to give a ring… (I think I did remarkably well – no wonky rings!). I also used Spelbinders arrow dies to make the arrow, but I thought it was very big and overpowered the target, so I cut off the point so it looked like the arrow is buried in the target… I coloured the fletchings with a Spectrum Noir pen to make them blue and tie in with the target colour scheme.

To set the scene I used Xcut dies to create forest/countryside background, and to add a little interest I used my Clarity stencil brushes to add browns and greens to the layers. I started with a 12x12inch piece of card that I trimmed to 12x7inches then I scored at 3.5 inches from each edge to give a 5×7 panel in the middle. I used my scoring board to score every 1/4 inch and then folded them into a concertina. I glued all my die cut scene panels into the concertina. At the back I glued a blue panel as the sky to peek through all the layers and I glued a white panel over this to hide all the ‘workings’ of the card and for everyone to write messages onto.

The stitched banner is my go-to Creative Expressions dies and the sentiment is the Tattered Lace ‘Welsh Sentiments’ dies.