Papercrafting: A Cute Birthday Card for a Boy

It is so enjoyable to make cards for family and friends.  AND also sometimes terribly frustrating if they do not work the way I hope they will.  This time I was making a card for a seven-year-old boy.  Because I am not at all creative, I put it out there on YouTube and found this lovely video at Weekend Card.  It was for a cute car.  Since I had inquired recently what the grandson enjoys at this point in his life and he replied that it was cars, I thought this was the card for him.

Vickie, at Weekend Card, very generously made a PDF for free download to go along with her video.  Go to her Clips-n-Cuts webpage for a download.  In the right hand sidebar there is a "What are you looking for?" query box.  Put in "cute car" and it will pop right up for you.

This is the car I made:

The green base for the card (which, of course, opens up so you can insert a message, a check, a long letter to the child to test his reading skills, or whatever else you want to include) was green card stock, or maybe it was cover stock. It was pretty heavy.  The yellow tires were of the same type of paper, and funnily enough, will be the background for another child's car some day.  The striped paper was from a 12-inch stack of lots of interesting papers which I cut down then placed in our inkjet printer with the colored side up---in our printer that is how you have to get it so you can print on the white side of the paper (to make it easy to see the pattern for cutting).  Your printer may be different.  If you need to check which side prints first, open the paper tray, put a little "x" on the bottom (toward you) of the plain paper in the tray on the right hand corner.  Print something on the paper then see where the "x" shows up.  That will let you know how you need to place your figured paper.

You can see that I also made a matching envelope.  I used We R Memory Keepers punch board for the envelope.  This took an 8.5" by 8.5" square to make the right sized envelope.  Sometimes I think that the envelopes give me more of a sense of delight than the cards....  Sometimes.  This card really did it for me!