I am sure Chris wouldn’t want me to disclose his actual age and whilst denial is a man’s best friend once you pass the 30 threshold, I still wanted to make the big day as memorable as possible. This included the card. What kind of craft lover would I be if I let a birthday go by without at least attempting to make a card!
I have recently been researching and exploring different ways of printing and wanted to incorporate this into a card design. After looking into several options I decided on lino printing as my favoured route. I searched back into the cob-webbed archive of my brain, back to the days on my foundation course at Art College and remembered enjoying carving little lino type worms out of the base material and attempting to make some sort of pretty pattern.
With that said, I visited my favourite Art Shop in Brighton and purchased an A4 sheet of lino and some carving tools. Once home I set about sketching some fonts and planning the card design itself. I wanted something quite simple, so settled on an easy and sincere birthday message…Happy Birthday (I know…Clinton Cards I’m free for freelance if you need me). Wanting to bring a little 3D aspect into the card, I left a couple of the letters blank ready for me to add something to enhance the design.
One thing I did remember from all my time at Art College, was to make sure that when you use lettering in a lino print, you always need to write the message backwards. Otherwise once printed you would also have to present the viewer with a mirror so that they can read their personal message in the way it was intended. Once the message was carved, I used a roller to cover the print block with acrylic paint and print onto the card itself.
I then used my trusty (and now favourite) button covering tool, discovered when upholstering my Victorian Chair, to make some 3D letters to finish the original and sincere birthday message. I firstly had cut and sewn the missing letters onto some patterned fabric and then used the tool itself to cover some 19mm buttons (I’ll blog about how to make your own buttons soon).
Once finished I then hand sewed the buttons into the missing spaces to finish the overall look.
Suffice to say, I think Chris was pleased with his card, but it was pretty hard to tell when I was trumped by the £25 winning scratch card my Auntie sent him in her card!
