Cinema Saturday #41 or Tiarna's Birthday Card

It's astounding, time is fleeting... sorry, wrong movie! But you are caught in a bit of a time warp here! Cinema Saturday #41 was Chamber of Secrets, and ever since I did the Beauty & The Beast castle card I was wanting to do a more realistic castle version, which all tied in nicely with Tiarna's birthday coming up... I got started but took quite a break from this card and only just finished it 11pm Saturday night, with Tiarna's 10th birthday being on Sunday. Here is the card I made for her:

Even though Tiarna has just recently read the LOTR books (and a LOTR themed card would have tied in nicely with this weeks Cinema Saturday movie), she has been a Harry Potter fan since she was 18 months old. There was no way I could make a card that included all of the Hogwarts castle, so I went through images I have on my harddrive and picked a section (the section to the right of this image) that would be relatively easy to replicate (though I of course took some liberties). I made two main changes to the construction of this card from the Beauty & The Beast one, the most obvious being to use textured cardstock instead of plain. This gave it more of the rough brick look, it is also thinner so less bulky when you have a lot of layers and the card is collapsed (this one still fits into a large square envelope, but only just!). I also used textured cardstock for the roofing, however it is turned inside out so the less textured side is showing and you get a contrast in the textures. The other change I made was a structural one: it was hard to get the castle to stand upright on it's own, the nature of the basic concertina fold meant it was always tilted backwards. For Hogwarts I lengthened the sides that weren't going to have cardstock attached to them, so those that did have cardstock attached would stand pretty much vertical.

Tiarna loved her card, but I have just remembered that I had stamped and coloured an owl for Hedwig that I had intended to use on this and forgot to put it on... so shall have to do that and see how long it takes her to notice ;)

All supplies by Stampin' Up!
Cardstock: Going Gray, Going Gray textured, Bordering Blue textured, Basic Gray
Stamps: none!
Inks: Going Gray, Old Olive, Garden Green
Accessories: Word Window punch, Horizontal Slot punch, 1/2" circle punch, 1" circle punch, cutter kit, dauber, scoring blade on paper trimmer
Show watched while creating: Aus v Eng limited overs cricket

...and because I am not quite ready to have a post without Karl Urban...

Tiarna's Howler

Saturday was Tiarna's birthday. She's a mad keen Harry Potter fan and has been since she first watched Philosopher's Stone when she was 18 months old. After years and years of dragon cards I decided to go with something a bit different this year, and made her a Howler. I first saw this on Melanie's blog about a year ago, however I have made mine a little different. The base is a 12x12 sheet of Real Red textured cardstock (I went with textured because it is a little thinner than the normal cardstock) and inside is a 21cm square of printer paper that isn't completely folded in the fortune/chatterbox/cootie catcher way (ie the last folds into the middle are not done). I had decided to stick the top and the bottom together in the middle (using sticky strip), so I trimmed the paper that was to stick in there a bit to take out some of the bulk, cut the teeth and stuck it in. This does mean that it won't lay flat but that's ok since I wasn't posting it. The tongue is a bit of 5/8" Real Red grosgrain ribbon.

As cool as Tiarna thinks her card is, I think it is all in the delivery... I think she would have fallen off her chair if someone hadn't been standing on the other side as the Howler told her off for not opening her presents (did you know father's can face inquiries at work over that?).