Two masculine birthday cards...

TodayI is the birthday of two wonderful men in our family - my uncle and my son-in-law. I thought my uncle might relate to and appreciate the retro typewriter from Spellbinders. My sister has this die and made several cuts for me, so I used one of them on this card.

I dressed up the die with a semi-circle of gray cardstock, on which I drew some radii and inked the edges. I also added a piece of gray cardstock behind the openings for the keys and spacebar and added some silver brads and black Viva Décor faux pearls.

The two decorative black strips are washi tape with a brad at the end of each.

It's fun to also add a piece of paper with a "typewritten message" on it, as I have done here. I decided to really personalize this card with my uncle's name on the paper.

My inside is pretty simple, with a sentiment mat cut with a Spellbinders Labels 8 die. The sentiment is from a Fiskars birthday stamp set.

My next card was made for my son-in-law. He's a really great guy, and I wanted to make sure he knew how much we cared about him. At the same time, I wanted the card to be fun. Here's what I came up with:

I started with some masculine/grunge DSP in a chevron black-and-white pattern for my base card. Then I added some layers of black, green and white squares. Each is on one thickness of foam tape.


My sentiment is computer-generated with a doodled border around the edge of the square. Since I cut one of my squares from that cute green star-patterned paper, I decided to die-cut a few more stars and glitter them up before adding them to my card.

I don't think you can see the sparkle very well in these pictures, but it's there!

Here's the inside of the card with a star-studded mat and a few more sparkly stars for fun.

Since our six children are grown adults with good jobs and lovely homes, they really don't need birthday gifts from us. We decided years ago to give donations to worthy causes in their honor instead.

For our son-in-law's birthday, we made a donation in his honor to the Heifer Project.  Here is one of the cards you can print out from their website.

We often try to select a charity that would be of interest. Our son-in-law is a terrific gardener, so we thought that something that promoted raising your own food might be of interest to him.

Do you do something different for your grown children's birthdays? I'd love some more ideas!

Thanks so much for stopping by, and remember to laugh--a little or a lot--every day.
Cheryl