Spread Your Wings

 Do you struggle to make some thing special for the men in your life - I know that I do so I thought it would be a good idea to make something a little different for them using some of the wonderful masculine papers that are in the 14 Craft Bar shop along side a fancy base. I chose the canvas zig zag pop up  card for my base as I felt the canvas base would add a luxurious feel to my make. For my decorations I chose the Craft O'Clock paper range Age of Gentlemen using a combination of the 6 x 6, journal extras, chipboard die cuts and elements fussy cut from the extras sheet. 

Decorating the zig zag card requires a little bit of creative cutting. - To create the side panels I cut a piece 0.5cm smaller in both dimensions than the panel and lined it up over the center piece so that I could mark the places to cut out the small flap creating the pieces that are shown below adhered into place. I chose to edge all of my paper pieces with Faded Jeans Distress Oxide as I felt this worked well but you could chose a different blue it you wanted to.

I then cut panels for each of the remaining pieces - both front and back of the card as shown in the next two photographs.

I then added tags and ephemera tickets as shown, adding coordinating shabby ribbon number 60 to the tags using a Larks Head Knott.

I then decorated the panels further with more elements from the journal extras and extras sheet along with some sentiments that were in my stash - you could use any thing you wanted to do these including stamping words/thoughts onto scraps of paper to get a similar effect.

I added more pieces to the back panels as shown below.

To decorate the cover of my album I adhered another piece of shabby ribbon to the middle of the front - Do not take it and add to the back panel as this will make it impossible to open the "card". Leave the tail to the right shorter than the one to the left which will ultimately wrap around the back so it can be tied at the side.

The ribbon was then covered with a layer of paper with a second matt 0.5cm adhered on top using foam tape so that chipboard elements could be tucked underneath at the sides top left and bottom right. A piece of background clocks was cut to size and adhered in place before two tags were added, another chipboard piece and my sentiment. For the back panel I added layers of paper and a pocket from the journal extras pack along with some more tags with shabby ribbons.

I hope you like this piece which I think would make a very special occasions card for the man in your life and encourage you to have a look at making cards that are different to the usual squares and rectangles we see on a day to day basis.