It is Heather’s 70th and we’ve been invited to lunch (no gifts please) This means a card…and I think it should be homemade. My husband says I overdo it, that it will take too long, that I am already oversubscribed time-wise, that I obsess. I still think this means a special card, not one of my many printed cards which I sell.
I had half an hour to spare between walking the dog and breakfast (which my husband made) so first, research: What does Heather mean? Oh yes, it’s a flower and quite a simple one to paint quickly. Nice paper – proper art paper – Saunders hot pressed of watercolour paper – that’s always good. Big pen (Speedball C-0), watercolour. Forget about writing 70. She’s 70 not 7, and it’s quite nice not to have 70’s all over the show.
I start with an A3 sheet of bond and a strip of good paper. I try ‘Heather’ once on the bond, to work out the approximate size, then I write it so that I can keep the deckled edge at the bottom, I love edges as you can see. I envisaged using the h as a heather flower. (It has only just occurred to me that the h is also the initial for Heather). Anyway tear the paper to size after writing the name. (I put pin-pricks from the front to show where to tear, then tear from the back for a nice edge. Back to the paper drawer to look for something to mount it on – lilac – purple, pink. Ahh, I found some nice chunky bright pink Nepalese paper and then saw the green paper which I used for an envelope. Oh and some lovely Japanese paper which I don’t think I’ll ever use! The pink paper wasn’t large enough and anyway it was too chunky to fold, so flat’ll do.
Pity the pencil writing went crooked but by that time I was being called to breakfast. It looks worse in the photo than in real life! When you have a slightly larger card, you need to fold your own envelope. Follow the link to a previous blog on how to do this.
Lastly, it may seem over the top, but rather than ‘less is more’ in this case, ‘more is more’ so it got wrapped, ribboned and photographed after breakfast. My ultimate goal is to make Heather feel special.
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