The big 50

Well here we are it's the first day of a brand new year,and I wonder what it has in store for each of us. I'll start by wishing health and happy times in 2017 to all my readers here. I have spent very little time at the computer lately and appolgise for my lack of commenting and blogging recently. I am really hoping to make better use of my time this year and get back to blogging more regularly.
This card I am showing today was made for my daughter who celebrated her 50th birthday this week. ( That makes me feel quite old!!) I am sorry about the quality of the photo, it was taken under artificial light. The card is actually ivory and not white as it appears, and looked much warmer. I cut and folded the 6"square card from a sheet of linen textured card, and then found a snippet of smooth card which matched to stamp on. The bear stamp is part of a set from Docrafts which I think I got for a bargain price in the Range some time ago. It's a good set because it has several of bears in different sizes and also lots of little elements which stamp really well and I have found them very useful. It also has some sentiment stamps included too. I stamped the bear with Memento Rich Cocoa ink and coloured it with Derwent Colousoft pencils blending the shades with Sansodor. I coloured the envelope with a white gel pen to make show up better on the ivory card. The image was then cut out with a Spellbinder die from the Marvelous Squares set. I cut a square of patterned paper from a 6"x 6"Papermania pad using a Li'l inker stitched die and stuck it cornerwise onto the front of the card. I stamped Happy Birthday directly onto the card with a Chocolate Baroque stamp and Rich Cocoa ink. The 50th was cut from another small snippet of ivory card using a Britannia die. I coloured all the cut edges including the image and the numbers by running the edge of a dark brown distress marker along them. This is a bit fiddly especially on the small bits but it really adds definition to the edges. When the main image was stuck in place I cut a butterfly from another piece of the patterned paper and stuck it over the original one using silicon glue to raise the wings slightly.

I am taking this with it's couple of snippets to play in Pixies Snippet Playground where there is, as always, a super prize up for grabs.

I am also entering at Penny Black and More Challenge -Anything Goes
                                 Fashionable Stamping - Anything Goes
                                 That's Crafty -Anything Goes.

Thank you for your visit, Please leave a comment so I know you have been. I read and appreciate all of them.
Jean