Through The Craft Room Door Anything Goes Challenge and Gary's Birthday Card

We are being sponsored this week by Oozak. And, as always, our challenge is Anything Goes. We certainly had a lot of wonderful entries last week, and I expect we will this week, too! Looking forward to them.

So, Gary's birthday is tomorrow. He will be turning the big "65", which could be his retirement age. But, fortunately for my crafting budget, he has decided to work another year or two. I honestly think he would get really bored being home all the time. I hope he finds a part-time job once he does retire, so he doesn't drive me crazy all day! OK, crazier. You got me.

So I managed to make this card without his knowledge. I worked on it while he was in bed sleeping or at work. And, as he doesn't read my blog, he won't see this until he opens the envelope tomorrow.

He didn't want me to buy him a birthday present. He got a fishhook necklace, carved from petrified walrus tusk, when we were in Maui in January. That was supposed to be his birthday gift. So I bought some new sheets for our bed instead of a personal gift. Yeah, I know it will benefit me, too, but they are in the color that he wanted to use as an accent. And I have been waiting almost three years to find them. It's really silly that you have to wait until a color is "in" to use it in your home, don't you think? Oh, they are teal in case you were wondering. And if you weren't, too bad.

I am caught up on my DT comments, but woefully behind in my blog comments. I will get caught up though; I just had to get this card done first. It seems to be a bit impossible to do both at the same time. Perhaps if I grew another set of arms...

I chose another MayzyArt image to color for this card, called Baseball. I think he is really cute, and I thought it was appropriate to use it for Gary's birthday. We have partial-season tickets to weekend games for the Arizona Diamondbacks, and opening day is less than two weeks away. I attempted to color the uniform in D'back colors, and was more or less successful. (Whatever that means.)

The image was printed on Cryogen CS and colored with my Copics:

Eyes: B32, B34

Skin: E000, E00, E11, E21, R20

Hair: E33, E35, E37

Shoes, pants, and bat: E21, E23, E25

Socks, shirt, and hat: E02, E08, E09

Ball: C00, W0

Clouds: C0, C2, C3, W0, B60

Sky: BG0000, BG000

Grass: G20, G21, YG63, YG93, YG97, YG99

My thanks go out to Alyce Keegan for her tutorials on coloring sky, clouds and grass. Obviously I need more practice, but this will have to do for today.

I decided to do another sketch for this card. It saved me time in trying to design something myself. I found the following on Simon Says Stamp! Challenge Blog:

My DP layers for this sketch are from the Basic Grey What's Up collection. (I am going to enter their spring challenge with this card, as well as the Simon Says Challenge.) Card stock is from both Stampin' Up and DCWV. I distressed the DP using Distress Ink. I cut my tree using the Memory Box Grand Oak Tree die, and the fence using the Cheery Lynn Victorian Picket Fence die. I added a bit of Tim Holtz Film Strip Ribbon. And I also made up my own sentiment. Yes, it can be taken two ways--and I did that for Gary. (He has such a weird sense of humor. Mine, however, is quite normal. OK, you can quit rolling your eyes.) The inside reads: "...just don't hurt yourself." I hope he finds it amusing.

That does it for me until Friday. Be sure to check out the cool creations by my fellow teamies!