Happy birthday from another great year

Have you been enjoying my alternative cards using the Another Great Year kit? Are you ready to get your kit out and start creating some of your own cards? I sure hope I’ve lit a spark for you to try using your kit that is just sitting there on your shelf! It doesn’t do any good there, and you know you can always use fast, easy and ready to go cards at a moment’s notice!

Today’s card uses the small arrow heads or chevrons, depending on your perspective, paper from the Another Great Year kit. This was another of the paper patterns I tried many different things to create a card. When I was searching for papers to combine it with, I found my partially used Go Wild DSP stack with Basic Black, Whisper White and Tip Top Taupe colors. And found the perfect pattern – a black and white artistic brush stripe! I love stripes just as much, or maybe a little more, than polka dots! Now black and gray are not your typical birthday celebration colors, right? So I sat in front of my Stampin’ Up! cardstock case to begin looking through the various options to pair with these two DSP papers. I decided on the Pear Pizzaz paper, I haven’t used that color in ages! So here’s my card:

The black & white stripe is framed with Basic Black and the gray arrows are framed with Basic Gray. I stamped the greeting in Basic Black using the Birthday Banners stamp set and cut it out with the Bunch of Banners framelits. I glued the banner to a scrap piece of Pear Pizzaz and fussy cut it out so there was a Pear Pizzaz border around my banner greeting. I put the card together and really liked how it looked, but wondered if the birthday greeting wouldn’t be “happier” if it was not in black, but Pear Pizzaz. So here’s the banner stamped in the Pear Pizzaz. It doesn’t stand out quite as much, but a birthday greeting in black might be a little depressing (but appropriate if it’s one of the “BIG” ones?). Which ink color do you like better on this card – Basic Black or the Pear Pizzaz?