A Birthday Card Challenge

This was a hard one. This is for Reverend John's birthday (Feb. 6). I wanted a religious reference but with a sense of humor (because he and I both have one). One of the challenges was to make it masculine. This was harder because he doesn't hunt or fish or play sports and that's what you find when you are looking for images for a masculine birthday card. And this is one time Gus just wouldn't work. I liked the play on words with the shell/shall. I was surprised to learn that "this too shall pass" is not a quote from the Bible. I always just assumed it was. So I went looking for turtle images. Turned out I had one, this guy was a past freebie from Little Scraps of Heaven. I love their images because I can import them into my Silhouette as a cut file. I remember the days when I had to cut the pieces out by hand, this is soooo much easier. I followed the sketch from the Stella Says Sketch challenge at Bugaboo, I just flipped it.

I used seashell patterned paper cut a 1/4" smaller than my card as my base. I printed my own sentiment onto light blue cardstock that I had cut out using a scalloped frame image from my Silhouette. The waves ribbon is also a Silhouette image and I cut them out of my brightest blue cardstock. Sand patterned paper made the base for my turtle. I used a glittery green cardstock (the same glittery green cardstock as the impossible to get a good picture of glittery red cardstock in my earlier Valentine's) for my turtle. I traced around each piece with my green Zig marker to add a little definition. My printer added the Happy Birthday to the small heart. I added iRock gemstones to the sentiment 'shell' and turtle shell. Put some faux stitching around both.
My lessons learned: he's cute, but not very masculine. Thank goodness I have 2 little girls (Kaylee gets to decorate the inside, and Abby gets to do the envelope) so I think it still works.

Those 2 circles on either side of Abby's head are her ears.....so not an exact likeness ;o)

I would like to share my card at:
Dream Valley Challenges use an animal, closes Feb. 5,
Digistamps4Joy for the boys, closes Feb. 8,
Simon Says animal antics, closes Feb. 8