21st Birthday Card - Redux

What is this, you ask? This is the perfect example of why I do not take landscape photographs, or at least why I do not take dramatic landscape photos. Okay, okay, no doubt I was 180 degrees off on my camera settings, but still. It has been raining for 24+ hours, and on the way home this evening, the sky was amazing. There were those dark clouds to which we have all become grudgingly accustomed, but then there were breaks in the clouds with slashes of the most gorgeous oranges against the blue sky...

So when I got home, I ran to the end of the block and took this... this ... blech. No, that is not the moon; it is a street light. And except for the power lines, and the lights from the strip mall across the street, and the, well, the everything in my way, it could have been a dramatic shot. Right? Maybe? I know I am supposed to focus on the sky, but it is nearly impossible to do that when there are friggin' street lights in the way!!!!!!! I need to be on a prairie, not in suburbia!!!!! Sigh.

After my utter failure in the Night Sky arena, I came in and re-thunk my boy's b'day card, and decided against the glitter fest, so he gets this:

Plain old embossed numbers. Nice and tame and non-embarassing. And he won't be washing glitter out of his clothing for weeks and weeks.

I stole the chipboard letters off of the last card iteration, and they did not come off without a fight, so they are a little thinner than they started out. Then I got this hair-brained idea to color them with the burgundy marker to get them the exact same color as the numbers, but I opted not to sand them first. Big mistake. The marker ink just sort of sat on top of glossy chipboard letters. I tried to heat dry it, and the darn stuff had the nerve to evaporate! Well, only parts of it evaporated, leaving behind the mottled letters you see here. (Go ahead and click on the picture to get a really good look at what 'mottled' looks like. Go on, I'll wait... ... ... Are you back? Okay, let us continue.) But wait, there's more! I was not sure it was dry, so I touched it and the durn stuff came off on my fingers: not dry. So I stuck the pesky letters in Versamark and clear-embossed them to seal in the mottle-ness. That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

Now I need to go make another cat card for tomorrow's planned post. You'll see why tomorrow. ;-) Thanks for stopping by!