Time to Celebrate

Do you find men's cards as difficult as I do?  This one is for my Brother-in-law's birthday soon.

It is always easier for me to make cards just for the fun of it.  When I have a particular one to make my mind goes blank.  Anyway this is what I eventually came up with, hope you like it. 

 I used pearlescent chocolate coloured card for the base which I part-embossed with a cuttlebug folder using a shim I had previously made with a circle cut out of it.  It didn't work quite as well as I hoped though, you can see some faint circles from the embossing inside the clock.  I then embossed a nestie circle where the plain part was.  The cogs were embossed in the card using actual diecuts and an embossing rubber mat.  A distress inked Tim Holtz clock diecut with vintage photo (my only distress pad so far) was added as the main feature.  I added some gold highlights around the outside edges with a versamark pen and some gold cosmic shimmer mica powder to jazz it up a bit.  The letters were cut with Crealies alphabet dies and the sentiment is a computer generated one printed on a snippet of patterned paper.

Happy crafting!