'Bling' 21st Birthday card

This is a card that I was commissioned to make for someone I work with, for her daughter's 21st birthday. The brief was simply 'Blingy' and maybe 'pinky' but she wasn't looking for anything flowery or themed in that way.

I started with a plain black card that came from Papermill, which I think provides a contemporary look to the finished card.

I instantly knew that I wanted to use the heart mat that came from a Kanban kit sold on QVC. It is a kit they sold as a summer surprise, so p&p was free, and was a serious bargain (even without the free p&p, it's well worth buying though). The kit contains 96 sheets of die cut mats in various shapes e.g. circles, squares, hearts, flowers and decorative edged mats too. They come in black, white, cream, red, lilac, blue and pink and are foiled with gold & silver. Some of the black mats are also printed with a matte white design. There are at least 6 different mats on each sheet and they are designed to go with the plain cardstock mats that Kanban produce. I personally think that some of them are far too nice to cover up such as the foiled heart I used on this card. The kit worked out to be 20p per sheet of die-cuts which I think is exceptional value.

To create the 'bling' 21 in the middle of the heart, I started by trying to form a good shape with the plain stones but did struggle slightly. I ended up looking through my stash of number peel-offs and finding some that were the perfect size. I carefully cut round the peel-off waste to create a stencil and then stuck this to the foiled heart to provide a guide. The gem stones were too wide to fit in the stencil gap so I had to draw the outline and then remove the peel-off, but it worked well. The stones were a clear diamond gem, so I used a 'hot pink' promarker to colour them. The easiest way to do this was to put a bit of blu-tack on the end of my pokey tool and then use this to hold the gem as I coloured it.

Beyond the heart, I didn't really know what else I wanted to put on the card, so spent a while looking through my paper stash. I couldn't find anything that was really what I wanted (craft room full of stuff but never got what I want!) and ended up looking through my stencil collection. The swirly stencil seemed like a good fit and had spots that I envisaged holding more gems in the hot pink colour. I didn't have any glitter that was a close match so decided to use the turquoise colour for contrast instead. I used a thin, ballpoint, sakura glue pen, through the stencil, and then glittered it. While waiting for the glue to dry, I coloured some papermania clear self-adhesive gems, to match the sizes of the dots in the stencil, and then applied these when the glue was dry.

The final aspect was to use some 3-d foam (I mainly use the 'Poundland special' where you get a roll and sheets of 3d foam for just £1. Large-ish squares so you need to cut it, but a definite money saver!) to mount the heart at the top of the card. I positioned it so that it, ever so slightly, overlapped the edge of the base card.