A Pair of Birthday Cards

June's a busy month for birthdays here; in particular we have five in five days among our friends and families just now. I made these two cards for teenage boys in the same session using the same materials with two recent card sketches.

The first one was from Stick It Down and that spotty background inspired me to use a mask for the base of the card. I picked a couple of colours of distress inks and used an ink applicator with a new mask from Creative Embellishments. I then looked for papers that would match the ink colours and chose an old 6x6 pad from My Mind's Eye for the banner. I stamped and punched my sentiment but it looked a bit lost so I added an extra circle behind it.

My second card is based on card sketch #123 from Sketch-n-Scrap. I used the same mask, stamp and paper pad and one of the papers had a triangle print that was perfectly suited to the banner strip across the card. I stamped and punched another sentiment square and used that instead of the flower on the sketch but I moved it down to connect it with the other card elements as I didn't like it 'floating' where the flower is. This way you can also clearly see what the pattern is on the speech bubble paper.