It’s my Mum’s birthday today (Happy Birthday, Mum!) and I wanted to make her a special card. I’ve combined three of my favourite things here: pretty paper, bunting and stamps! I bought all of the things to make this card from Paperchase – one of my favourite shops!

You will need:

A piece of white A4 card
A selection of coloured papers
Some alphabet stamps
An ink pad
Scissors and glue

Step 1

Take the first letter stamp and stamp it on one of the pieces of coloured paper. Cut out a triangle around the letter.

Repeat this with all of the other letters.

Step 2

Fold the piece of A4 card in half and arrange the bunting pieces. I originally wanted to make a landscape card, but after moving them around a little I realised that portrait would work better for my bunting.

Step 3

Glue each bunting piece onto the card – don’t worry about glueing the pointy bits of the triangles, as this gives a better effect of the bunting hanging.

Ta-dah! That’s it – you’re ready to send it!

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Our lovely friend Rachel celebrated her 30th birthday this week, and I wanted to make her a special card for the day. Ages ago, I got some gorgeous Inktense watercolour pencils from Derwent (we went to visit the pencil museum at Keswick, which was amazing!). I’m not very good at drawing or painting, but these pencils are really easy to use and you can control exactly where the colour goes. When you add the water to the pencil, it produced really vivid inky colours, and even I can manage to make things look vaguely good when drawing!

For Rachel’s card, I wanted to draw a big 30 on the front using as many of the bright colours as I could. I took some inspiration from a ring binder that I got a very long time ago – I actually bought it to go to music college to study for my A-levels, when I was 16! Almost 12 years on the folder is still going strong! I like the way that the circles overlap and wanted to try to recreate that on the card.

I started by drawing circles of colour in the shape of the numbers – they aren’t touching at this point but are fairly close together.

When that was finished, I added the water. The best way to do this is to brush water over the circles randomly (rather than doing each one in turn around the numbers), as I found that the colours ran better this way.

And that’s it! All you have to do is wait for it to dry You could make your own envelope while you wait – I found a suitably colourful one to match. The good thing about this style is that you can do pretty much anything with circles and colours, and the possibilities are endless!

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