so last weekend was a very special birthday in our family. my bonus mama’s birthday. and when it comes to present shopping, i’m just gonna be honest…she’s a tough one to buy for. (i love you, bonus mama! ) so i did what i do in that situation…i thought and thought…and then, i made her something. thinking it could be a little something to brighten up her office, i dived into figuring out what she might like that might bring a little sunshine to her office.

i turned to my small blank canvas…11″ x 14″. then, gave some serious thought to color. my bonus mama is super cool…she likes pretty simple stuff and leans towards a modern yet traditional touch to things.

i went with a robins egg blue. subtle, yet a little touch of modern. two coats later and we were ready to adorn the canvas with something.

i turned to my cricut (of course…i’m sure you’re all figuring out the theme here.) to actually find something in my bank of cartridges that i could add to the canvas was a little more of a challenge. i have tons of flourishes, but i needed something that wasn’t overly flowery…i wanted to go more simple, and again with that modern feel. i found it on my cindy loo cartridge.

what i loved about this little touch was that it’s dimensional, using multiple paper colors and a layered effect. i wanted to obviously complement the robins egg blue, and decided to go for white, grey, a little touch of yellow and a lighter pink.

hint: i really, really relied on my x-acto knife and my glue pen on this one. the glue pen was great for getting just a touch of glue on the smaller pieces of the flourish. as for the x-acto knife, it was my best friend. with the layers on the flourish, there are naturally some small (and i mean miniscule) areas that needed to be trimmed up once the layers were being put together.

and to finish it off, i wanted to personalize it a bit for her…adding an “a” as another layer over the flourish.

pretty simple. hopefully she’ll enjoy having it somewhere that reminds her of us. finished it off with a simple ribbon and a “happy birthday” tag.

all wrapped up and ready for its trek to florida!