Happy 5th Wedding Anniversary – Wood style!

Wood. I like wood. It is natural, warm, textured, and can be clean and simple, grungy, whatever style you want, really! And it just happens that the “symbol” for 5 year wedding anniversaries is wood.

Gary and I have been married for 5 years now, and so I was nice enough to take him with me to Brussels last week when I headed to Belgium for OnStage Live. It was our anniversary on Thursday, so we headed out on the Eurostar on Wednesday and arrived late afternoon. After checking into the hotel and unpacking, we went out to explore the city a bit. We then had a lazy Thursday morning before I headed off to OnStage for 1pm for lots of excitement and news and inspiration!

So as it was our 5th wedding anniversary on Thursday, I had to make sure I had made a nice card, and I wanted to get some wood in there somewhere if I could:

Can you see the wood? It’s the background paper! You can probably see it better in this image:

The wood grain paper is one of the patterns in the Color Me Irresistible Specialty Designer Series Paper pack in the Annual catalogue (p142, @£11.75). There are 12 sheets in the pack, all with an embossed pattern printed onto them. 6 of the sheets are the current In Colours for 2015-2016, as well as black, and then the remaining 6 sheets are the same patterns in Whisper White. All of the sheets can be inked and changed up to suit your project, and the idea (as the name suggests) is to colour them up with your inks and sprays and the like, and the embossing will resist the ink creating two-toned (or multi-toned) papers. Very cool! Anyways, the Tip Top Taupe coloured sheet has a lovely wood grain pattern which was perfect for my needs. It gives a subtle, yet manly feel to the overall card.

I wanted at least one heart on the card, and had considered doing a heart-shaped shaker in the wood effect, but it seemed a touch girlie, in some ways. Then I hit on the idea of a star-shaped shaker, and had some large heart-shaped foil confetti in my (large) craft stash, which I thought would be a nice compromise.

I popped some little green stars into the mix to lighten it up a bit! It was a challenge to line up the star piece with the base card, while also getting the confetti encapsulated in the shaker and not stuck to the foam shaker tape, but I got there in the end! As I said recently, I am loving shaker cards at the moment!

The base card is made from (retired) naturals white card, which adds to the wood feel of the project, but Very Vanilla card would work just as well. The happy sentiment and the star frame were cut from red foil paper which is fabulous, and I used our top-quality thinlits dies to cut those out – the Stars framelits and the Hello You Thinlits. A bit of waxed paper (aka baking parchment) for the word dies, and they pop out of the dies a treat. And then you have a vellum-effect word to use as well if you want to! So cute.

I added the red glimmer paper Project Life Paperclip, cut with the new thinlits from the Annual Catalogue, and put it onto the star frame before it was stuck down, and I love the effect that gives.

I also added one of the confetti hearts to decorate the envelope.

I got a couple of rolls of Washi tape in Paperchase a little while back, and they fitted in nicely with the feel of the card, so I used the people tape on the inside:

Along with the handmade tape on the back:

I think it finished it off nicely. As always, I did stamp the back of the card with my Deep Blue Crafting stamp so anyone can know where it came from. Gary knows, but it’s always nice to have that finishing touch. I hadn’t done that yet when I took these photos, though.

There are some amazing offers at the moment, so I really need to let you know all about those as well. I think that given the photo-heavy nature of this post, it will be best if I create a new post for the deals and offers and information I have to share with you. Hopefully that will also make up for the lack of posting yesterday (and last week). Things here have been busy, and I had a lot on at work having been out of the office for a few days, plus I went to an IChemE lecture/ presentation last night about the Deepwater Horizon incident in the Gulf of Mexico, so that was quite a late finish (the event was in Guildford, not Mexico!) and I was busy unpacking and the like on Monday. We missed the twins, but not the mega early starts, and they had a fabulous time with Nanny and Grandad. They didn’t miss us too much, but they certsinly seemed pleased to have us home 🙂

So do come back in a bit when I will share lots of lovely information about current deals and upcoming excitement!

I hope that you like my wood effect anniversary card. Do leave a comment if you can, I love to hear what you think of my creations.