Hello everyone – I hope your weekend is going well. Today sees my former mother-in-law celebrate her 99th birthday, so I want to share the card I made for her. She loves robins so, as it’s a December birthday, I went with the Winter Build a Wreath stamp set and built her a birthday wreath!

Having trimmed a piece of card to fit on a 6×6 card blank, I started by cutting a circle aperture into it with one of Clarity’s nested dies. I perched the robin at the top, having used the corners of two Distress Ink pads to colour him – I had him on a stamp pen which made it easy to twizzle the stamp around the corner of the pad, with ‘gathered twigs’ from his feet to head and ‘fired brick’ for his tummy. I could then add the ivy leaves around the aperture with ‘pine needles’ Distress Ink, pointing them outwards from the circle.

I caried on building the wreath with more leaves, this time in ‘shabby shutters’, then added the small poinsettias and the little stars with the ‘fired brick’.

I laid the topper onto the card blank and drew myself a pencil guideline around the aperture, to be able to line up the numbers – moving the topper out of the way, I drew a pencil baseline as well and then stamped the 9 from the Alphabet & Numbers Word Chain set in ‘library green’ Archival ink. I added some scrap card onto the back of the topper for a little dimension and glued it to the card front.

Clean and simple, but that little robin really is the star of the show! I’m sharing this with a couple of current challenges as well – Simply Clean & Simple have got an optional twist of ‘reds & greens’ and Just Add Ink want us to add a celebration (and I think a 99th birthday qualifies for that!)