Life goes on ...

Well, it may be Christmas, but life - and birthdays - still go on exactly as before! I always like to carry a stock of quilled 'age' birthday cards, because customers at our market do occasionally ask for them. I've got designs for ages one through five, 18, 21, 30, 40, 50 etc right up to 100 - these seem to be the main 'milestone' birthdays that people generally want to buy for. Inevitably, I do sometimes get requests along the lines of "Have you got a card for a 42nd birthday - and I need it today?", which, sadly, have to receive a negative response. (If only they had thought to ask me a few days earlier, I could easily have made up a card specially.) Generally, though, I find it's cards for the 'milestone' birthdays that are mostly in demand.

At last Friday's market, I sold the '2nd birthday' card that I'd had in stock for quite some time. Instead of re-making the same design, I decided to try something new - and here's the end result:

It's been a while since I've played around with the blocks of solid colour that I can generate for printing using my Apple Mac Pages software, and it's actually been fun for me to return to them today. I think vibrant blocks of colour can make wonderful backgrounds for quilling. For this card, I've used orange, purple and yellow to create a bright background (carefully avoiding pink or blue as this really needs to work as a 'unisex' design!!) I created some simple gold 'twists' to emphasise the corners of the central '2' using my slotted tool, and then added two quilled balloons and a couple of lime green vortex coils to complete the card.

Hopefully this will be seen as a fun design that might appeal to a young child ... and I'm already thinking about another version with some quilled birthday candles.