Balloon Stars with Stripes

Today I'm playing along with a new (to me) blog challenge: Seize the Birthday.  Every time Stampin' Up! comes out with a new catalog, I always look for a new birthday set.  After being a demonstrator for 17 years (yikes, am I getting that old?), I have collected a lot of fun birthday sets.  Some years I find a set that it just okay, and some years I find something great.  Well, this year's Occasions Catalog has not just one, but two fun birthday sets.  My favorite is the Balloon Bash set which I used on this card.  The Balloon Bash set has some fun greetings that could be used as the focal point on the card, but I'm a huge fan of the three balloons in the set (as evidenced by how much I use them on birthday cards lately).

This week's challenge at Seize the Birthday is to make a Tall and Skinny card.  I generally make the standard card size (5-1/2"x4-1/4"), like I make that size 99% of the time, so it was fun to branch out a little and create something a bit different.  I decided that this would be a great size to put cash or a check in.  I stamped my balloons in Calypso Coral, Real Red, and Crisp Cantaloupe to match the striped paper from the Stacked with Love DSP.  The Crisp Cantaloupe layer at the bottom of the card actually has stars embossed on it (using the Lucky Stars embossing folder) but they don't show up well in this photo.  I stamped the Happy Birthday greeting from the Crazy About You stamp set in Calypso Coral and mounted that on a strip of Real Red.  To give it the pennant shape, I used my hexagon punch to punch each layer.  Everything is tied up with some Calypso Coral seam binding ribbon and layered on my Calypso Coral card base.