Happy {belated} Birthday, Anders!

My sweet and tough nephew, Anders, turned 11 on September 4th, and I'm finally getting around to making his birthday card. He actually got his birthday gift last May, so at least it wasn't late! We'll be celebrating Anders' birthday along with George's this Saturday (eeek, I'm spinning in circles with so many things to do and don't know where to start...as I sit here blogging, aaaack!).

I was so inspired by Kelly's All Star SFYTT card last weekend and used it as my inspiration piece/starting point. Thanks for your never-ending inspiration, Kelly!

I've had this football textured paper for quite some time and was so excited to finally use a piece of it again. I paired it with PTI's Perfect Plum and Kraft card stock, with accents of black (Purple is our town's school color, thus the Perfect Plum choice). I loved how Kelly used the patterned paper and numbers to create the football field, and since I didn't have the same paper in purple, I simply scored lines every 1/2" and then stamped my numbers using PTI's Fresh Alpha.

My All Star set from PTI had yet to see ink, and I've had it for months, so I was sooo pleased that it worked out so well here. The chipboard letters are from Basic Gray and are actually lower case L's, but I think they work just fine to create an "11". I feel like I'm rambling, so I'll wrap this up, but I just want to point out the star in the circle/number cluster area. I somehow wanted to incorporate the happy birthday sentiment from SU!'s Amazing to Zany, and couldn't find the right spot, so I stamped it repeatedly on a purple scrap and then punched it out with my SU! small star punch. I think it's my favorite part of the cluster!

Thanks for hanging with me through all my chatter today!

ETA: I set this to post tomorrow (Thursday), so I'm not quite sure why it's showing up today?? Please scroll down to see my previous post from today with a fun TCP Tuesday sketch!