Happy Birthday Card – Punch some flags!

I was playing around with the punch that came with my scoring board and I learned some interesting things. The first thing I want to share is a really simple way of making tiny flags by using a punch that creates notches.

If you have thin stripes of card stock or other paper, you can really easily create a whole lot of tiny flags to use in card making. I used different color strips that are ⅜ inch wide and punched them with a notch that creates a depth of ⅝ inch. The strips need to be less wide than 2 times the depth of the notch, or it won’t punch through and you have to do more cutting.

I found a spot on my punch from which I got a nice length of flags. Where the spot is does not matter, all that matters is that you remember the exact spot! The way I did it, was I just punched a notch, turned the strip of paper around and punched a second notch at the opposite side of the first.
That’s all you need to do to create one flag. For a second flag, I just put the first flag over the rest of the strip and cut a second flag off with my scissors.

For the card I used my Schmincke watercolors to create a gradient wash background on some watercolor paper. The paper was old — I am using up a lot of old watercolor paper — and not really good in the end. I used a 4 × 5½ card that was already folded and cut the watercolor background a quarter inch shorter than this to create the white border.
I drew a line for where the banner was supposed to hang and glued some black thread onto the background. To glue the thread, I pulled it over a glue stick while twisting it. Then I pressed it onto the line I drew earlier. I also made two tiny bows and glued them to the ends of the yarn, sticking out over the background.
I applied some sticky foam at the back of the flags, careful not to have it too close to the top so that it wouldn’t be over the thread, and applied them to the background. The first and last flag are sticking out over the background a bit, but not over the edges of the final card.
For the last part I used a mechanical pencil to sketch in the letters lightly and then used a Prismacolor brush tip marker to draw the “happy birthday!”. I let it dry a bit and then carefully erased whatever parts of the pencil sketch were still visible. I originally didn’t want to use a brush tip, but I reached for the wrong pen and decided to just go with it.
And then of course I glued the design onto the card stock.

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