Abstract Birthday

This is the card that I made for my sons birthday this week. I was inspired by an article by Joanne Allison in the February issue of Craft Stamper magazine in which she showed several techniques for using Drywall tape, available in the DIY section of many £1 shops. I thought  it would be ideal for making abstract cards suitable for men. By making small snippet sized samples I managed to incorporate most of the techniques she showed. As you can see the tape is in the form of a fine mesh, which is sticky on one side. The first technique, that I used on the right of the card is to simply lay it on as a stencil and ink through it, which I did gently with black soot Distress ink using a piece of cut and dry sponge. The next was to cut a piece of the tape and colour it with a permanent marker, I think I used a Whispers bright red marker. Next I stuck some tape to a snippet of card and covered it with some foil tape, also from a DIY shop I think. I used a paper stump to make sure the mesh really showed up.  It should then have been painted with black acrylic paint but I didn't have any black so I coloured it with a black permanent marker, and then sanded it lightly to reveal the metal. In the magazine this was left with the silver showing but fancied to see it gold so I rubbed some Treasure Brass gilding wax over it. For the last sample I stuck the mesh to a piece of double sided sticky sheet and then onto another snippet of card and tipped some gold glitter over it and used my fingers to press it down and burnish it before tipping off the excess. I realised at this point that it would have looked better if I had coloured the mesh first, but I rescued it by using a fine line black pen to go over the mesh lines. This was a little tricky as the pen kept collecting glitter on the nib and I had to keep cleaning it off, but as I had only made a small sample it wasn't too bad and the result was worth it.  I punched out a couple of stars from this, and one from the black and gold piece and glued them to the card. I stamped the greeting with a Chocolate Baroque clear stamp from the Amazing Birthday set, in the middle of the card and used a gold gel pen to highlight the word Amazing. I'm not sure if this shows in the photo but it might if you click on it to enlarge it. To finish I added the black and red dots with a random dots stamp from Denami Designs and black soot and fired brick Distress inks.
I had fun playing with this and as I now have a large roll of the tape I might well be using it again soon.
As I used little snippets of card for the samples I am going to pop over to the Snippets Playground with it and see what they have been getting up to this week.

I am also entering at Crafty Creations Challenges - Happy Birthday
                          Through The Craft Room Door - Anything Goes

Thank you all for looking and for your lovely friendly comments I really appreciate them.