A Retirement Card

This retirement card was created for a friend.  She actually retired at the end of the last school year, but the celebration didn't take place until yesterday.  I made an 8" x 8" card as it was being signed by a large group of friends.

I found an image that seemed suitable on the 'Life is a Beach' Cricut cartridge.  The retiree enjoys cruises, so I thought that a beach/deck chair would be appropriate.  One of the options on this cartridge is square card, so I set the size to 8" and used an A3 piece of pearlescent navy blue card on my large 24" x 12" mat to cut the base card.

I found the perfect piece of paper to add as a background in the Northern Lights paper pad from Claritystamp.  This was trimmed and glued behind the aperture.

To create a frame,  I used the Square Noble Pierced dies (Sets A & B) by Sue Wilson/Creative Expressions.  The outermost and fourth square in from one set were used to cut a frame from White Glitter card.  A narrower frame was cut using dies from the other set in teal card.  These were matted together and added to the front of the card.

For 'Relax', the word option from the same Cricut cartridge was used.  This time the size was set to 6" and the beach/deck chair trimmed off after cutting as I only wanted to use the word itself.  I used the same glitter card that had been used for the bottom frame.

Small, white peel offs (by Dawn Bibby) were added along the top left and bottom right of the frame to finish.

To finish the inside of the card, I trimmed two pieces of white card to 7.75" x 7.75" and used the 'Cloud' corner chomper from WeRMemory Keepers to finish them off.  These were attached to both sides of the inside of the card, covering the inside of the aperture completely.