Saturday 27 September 2014

Outside the Box

So I was asked by my soon to be mother-in-law to create a "big" 60th birthday card for her husband for everyone to sign at his surprise birthday party. Now I looked over my supply of male supplies and thought to myself none of this will work on a big scale it is all designed for normal sized cards, I especially wanted to use the stamp set The Open Sea as Smiley "<--the birthday boy" used to be in the navy and the surprise birthday party was nautical themed.

So with my heart set on that stamp set and my mind set on making a card with a big enough signing space for 20+ people my mind began to wander to the in the box cards and how I could extend it beyond the box. So lets bring out the finished card.


So picture one is how the card looks when taken straight out of the envelope, I wanted to keep the outside quite simple and just jazzed it up with a simple belly band, you will see the importance of the belly band further down.






Here you see what it looks like opened up another in the box card still nice and simple I didn't want it too busy as that just wouldn't suit the birthday boy who loves books and the ocean. I loved the new typeset paper for this project it tied in so well with the birthday boys other passions and I felt still went with the nautical theme.

Ok time to show you the importance of the belly band, now remember this card needed to be lard enough for 20+ people to sign and so far this isn't as it only measures about 6inches by 5inches when closed off memory. So how did I solve my little delema, have a look at the picture below.


As you can see once the belly band is removed an accordion style section folds out from the back revealing 7 blank panels measuring 2 and a half inches x 6 inches each allowing plenty of room for special messages to the birthday boy while still keeping an aesthetically appealing size ratio to suit the stamp sets used.

So from my experience making this card never think I can't, because at first I did I thought I can't make a nice card big enough for 20+ people to sign with my tools. The reason I thought this was because I was thinking of the Giant cards you buy in the shops but then I thought to myself, if they wanted one of those giant sometimes tacky cards they would have just brought one. So I thought outside the box and came up with this in the box card with an outside twist to solve my issue. So don't be afraid to try something new and add your own flair or adjustments to a well known fold, it might just be a hit! This one sure was at the party!

Check out below to see what I used on this project and I will see you next time thanks for reading my blog