Quilled birthday card for a centenarian!

Next weekend, my aunt will be 100 years old! I'll be going to a special family party in a couple of weeks' time, but wanted to send her card in time for the actual birthday - and here it is:

When I was on holiday in the Isles of Scilly in October, I took this photo of some fabulous pink hydrangeas (left), and have been waiting for an opportunity to use it. Well, today I decided that the time had come!

As I usually do with my photo background cards, I first pulled the photo into a bordered shape - an oval in this case - and matched the colour of the typography to the lovely sage green that appears in some of the hydrangea petals. Because it's quite a 'busy' picture and I didn't want this to distract from the quilling, I also reduced the opacity of the photo to 80% before printing the card.

The quilled flowers on the card are made by joining three strips in different shades of pink and 'flat rolling' them in Art Deco style. The filigree work between them is in dark green, but I'm afraid that colour doesn't show up too well in my photo (blame the dim afternoon light of an English winter!). I thought using blue in the butterfly's wings would make a good contrast to the pink flowers, but I've still kept a little bit of pink in the centre of the coils just to tie it all together.