Complementary Birthday

I created a batch of these for the church ministry folks to send for the January birthdays. I timed it all just right… I created extras in September and October so they had enough to send in November and December. That way I could focus on my Holiday preparations and not stress about having to make a batch of birthday cards. And it turns out there was barely enough – whew! I got word on the day after Christmas that a batch of cards would be needed for January because they were all out. Our Christmas celebrations were complete and I was able to enjoy creating these cards over the weekend. I handed them off to the coordinator at church yesterday and she was thrilled!

I thought you might be interested to get a window on how the “sausage is made” when I do a large batch of cards. I start by designing the card that I want to mass produce. You can see the initial card just below the Memento ink pad. This can actually be a bit time consuming because I try various papers, layouts and other elements. For the church ministry I need to make a lot of cards so I need to be careful with the amount of patterned paper, so estimating and math is required, too.

Once I have the sample card, then I move on to cutting all of the layers. Then I work through doing assembly line production for the various layers. You can see in the picture that I had just completed embossing the Lemon Lime Twist layer. I spritzed alcohol on the paper before embossing to get a better image and I spread them out to let the paper dry. I did the stamping in a similar fashion, using the Stamparatus to stamp each of the images, starting with the greeting and ending with the Petunia Pop fill in the upper wings. I have to say that the stamp positioning tools are a major game changer for mass production and I’m so glad that I have one. Even though Stampin’ Up! no longer sells one 😞 I highly recommend getting one to have in your crafting tools.

I also want to point out one amazing assistant that Stampin’ Up!™ provides on page 132 in the Annual Catalog. On that page you will find a color wheel that has all of the current colors (except the neutrals). On page 133 they have very helpful descriptions of ways that you can use the color wheel to find color combinations that will work based on color theory. For my card I used a Complementary combination which uses colors on opposite sides of the wheel. The different types of combinations are a great shortcut to finding colors that work together. I’m so glad that Stampin’ Up! included it in the catalog – it is super helpful! I encourage you to check it out.

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