How time flies, hmm…

Well time seems to be flying for me at the moment. The weeks keep whizzing past in a blur, I feel like we've just got started into the new school term and yet actually we're several weeks in now.
As predicted, the notes have been sent out with all the details for the school's harvest festival, service and the such like. We spend most days on the way to school with our heads down, watching out for conkers (only to then put them in coat pockets and forget about them) the leaves are falling, the bird feeders have been restocked with peanuts, yes, Autumn is upon us.

But the most notable marker of how time is flying for me, in a more defined way, is that my niece turned 18 this week. Talk about making me feel old! Since I have two, relatively young children I delude myself that I am still young-ish and things like this pull me up short.
She is the first of all the 'younger generation' of our family to reach this milestone. Surely it'll just feel worse as more of them get to the point where they can drive and legally drink. I'll have to start admitting to myself that I am actually a grown up now. Oh dear…

Anyway I decided to make G (my niece) a card to mark the occasion. She is a real pink kind of girl, so there really was no option on the card colour. I decided to keep it really simple, no printing, just using  the words '18 today', literally.

I liked the way the word 'today' still had enough strength to stand the card up, but I feel that since so much card is cut away it really could have done with a much thicker cardstock. I also want to play with an idea of making a slight colour difference between the number and the word. My gut feeling is that a two sided board would look great, but I don't know of many that have lovely bright colours with say, just white on the reverse. Plus, I still love this uncoated card that I'm using. Maybe I just need to print on a pattern of some sort.

This was an alternate design that I dummied up at the same time. It's using the same cardstock as the one above, just using three different colours. There's no printing on this one either, I let the cut edges kind of do the illustration for me.

It needs to be tweaked in several places, but overall I think the idea could work. It seems more suitable to a younger age though, so I may have another go at this one for the 10, 11, 12, 13 year old kind of age bracket. They might like the balloons.

Anyway, I went up North last weekend to see my niece and to share a bottle of bubbly with her on her special birthday (soon after she disappeared into the night to celebrate it properly with friends of her own age, and quite rightly so). Happy birthday G!