A birthday with elegant balloons

Hello crafting friends!

I've been meaning to show you this birthday card I made last week using what you might think of as a bread-and-butter sentiment set, Birthday Greetings by Alte&New. I adore the sentiments in this set and it also features a handy balloon - perfect, you might think, for children's cards or male cards at a stretch. I used the balloon to celebrate a beautiful young lady's birthday in some very feminine colours. Come and see:

I'm obsessed with pink and yellow as a colour combination this summer - clothes, decor, everything! I stamped these balloons in Stampin' Up inks - Petal Pink, Blushing Bride and So Saffron and added doodled strings with a fineliner.

They were heat-embossed which has intensified the colours. Aren't they delicious looking?! I stamped and embossed the Blushing Bride one again on a piece of scrap card, snipped it out and popped it up with dimensionals for a bit of interest.

I love this birthday sentiment which lends itself to a dash of colour - Calypso Coral in this case. You can see I tied the balloons (metaphorically speaking!) to the 'H' and extended the 'y' of birthday off the page to anchor it. The card was finished with some gently rounded corners :)

AND IN OTHER NEWS
I remember visiting my daughter in Manchester one year when we joined in the Chinese New Year celebrations. There were stalls selling snacks, souvenirs and balloons. One of the most popular balloons was a princess-shaped one and we saw lots of little girls carrying them. While we were watching the fireworks, we heard a cry behind us and saw that a balloon princess had broken free from someone's little hand. Looking up and seeing the princess sailing into the sky upside down struck my daughter and me as hilarious and we had a terrible fit of the giggles - which is what I remember most about the day.

Thanks for coming to visit me today. I think it's time I joined in with a challenge, don't you? If anyone has any favourite challenges they'd like to share, please let me know in the comments below!

See you soon,