Faux Woodgrain Birthday Card for Andrew

I thought I would take a brief respite from Christmas cards, we'll be seeing plenty of these in the next month. Back in August I made this card for my friend Andrew.

I used a technique called Faux Woodgrain which is great for male cards. If you'd like to learn how to do this (it's VERY easy), please click HERE for a YouTube tutorial from Dawn Griffith. In her tutorial, Dawn shows you how to make the woodgrain look like timber floorboards by drawing in brown lines:

The technique of swiping the ink pad directly onto paper is quite handy when you don't have any other suitable background options. And this technique can be applied to other colours too, I recently saw it done in blue tones which gave a "denim" look to the background of the card:

(Card and photography courtesy of Sharon Arkley, with thanks)

For Andrew's card, I used images from Loads of Love. Notice how I "grounded" the image so it doesn't look as if it is floating. I then decided to use some twine, a brad and double-sided foam adhesive to make the image look like it was a picture frame hanging on a wall.

Hope you're having a good weekend.

Love from Crafty Kim