Terrifying

The three most frightening words in the stamping language are "man's birthday card." It's really such a female-centric hobby, it's very hard to come up with ideas for a man's card. In this case, I figured I'd start out with a color scheme, so I pulled out some very basic-patterned Always Artichoke paper (Stampin' Up), with Papertrey's Kraft, white, and Dark Chocolate.

I searched Splitcoast for masculine cards and found this one - I like the basic layout quite a bit, so I made up a little chart to change the colors. I know that's weird, but since this has so many layers, I wanted to write out from the beginning which colors would land where and what sizes they needed to be. Since the base is A2 (5.5"x4.25"), the next layers in are 5.25"x4" and 5"x3.75". And so on - I pretty much always use quarter-inch increments for layers.

I switched the punched circles for stars, since I had a teeny star punch, and then looked around for a bigger star. I came up with a chipboard one, which was slightly lighter brown than the kraft I'd used for the tiny stars... I have a "thing" about matching, so I embossed it with white. The larger chipboard "celebrate" piece is covered with white paper so that I could stamp on it. I think it turned out well!