Starburst card (nothing to do with the candy, unfortunately)

So I haven't been blogging, but that doesn't mean I haven't been creating! As my daughter has gotten older, (almost 2 1/2! -- she'll tell you that she's a "big girl") I have been snatching bits of time here and there to make cards and work on her scrapbooks. The scrapbooks are important to me so that she'll have a record of who she is and how she got that way. The cards are important because they are a much lower stress way to exercise my creativity on a small canvas that doesn't necessarily need to be of keepsake quality.

Here's a recent card that I am particularly proud of because it was the first time I created a "starburst" effect with patterned paper (I am sure this isn't the correct terminology for this, but I'm lacking time to look it up). This is something I had seen all over the place in magazines and had been pinning on Pinterest for some time and which, quite frankly looked simple to achieve digitally but too hard to do by hand. I had been struggling with scrapbooking my daughter birth and early days, feeling that no design I could come up with would somehow be special enough. Voila, "starburst" effect layout. But I wanted to practice before I did it on a scrapbook page, so came up with this card design for a co-worker's birthday.

I made a standard 5.5 by 4.25 inch card with white card stock and put a dot in the lower left corner. I then cut a long triangle from patterned paper and lined the point up with the dot. I trimmed off the excess paper that overlapped the edge of the card. Then I cut another triangle and overlapped the first one, also lining up one point with the dot on the card. I repeated until I had covered the card with a rainbow of patterned paper scraps. I thought there was probably a scientific way to do this but I just eyeballed it and I think it came out pretty well.

The point at which all of the papers met was a little sloppy. I toyed with adding a sentiment there but nothing seemed quite right so I saved the sentiment for the inside (it just says "Happy birthday" -- nothing special) and instead added a large paper flower. I layered on a smaller pink flower and of course added a little rhinestone bling in the center (those cheap adhesive gems from Michaels or ACMoore that are like $1/sheet). I stamped the recipient's name with tiny alphabet stamps in one of my favorite inks -- Colorbox Charcoal chalk ink -- added a bit more bling and I was done.

The recipient loved it and put it in her special box of cards that I've made for her that she claims she is keeping for when I'm famous (for doing what, I'm not quite sure, but I appreciate her confidence)! I loved that I used up a bunch of scraps and I got to practice a new technique, all during my daughter's nap time.

One of these days I will have a little more time to make a video or at least take pictures during each step so I can show instead of tell how I did something. Maybe when I (finally) make the scrapbook page of my daughter's birth that making that card is helping me design!