March Madness

In this household, March Madness has two meanings.  First up would be the traditional focus on the Sweet 16 and The Toad and Oldest Kiddo constantly checking their brackets and bemoaning the unexpected upsets.

The second would be the craziness of helping pull off Grandparent's Day at the school, the start of middle school varsity basketball, spring (break) fever, the increased hours I end up working covering for the vacationing boss and  The Toad's and my wedding anniversary (for which I need to make a card for......guess after 17 years he'll still stick around if I'm late?!).

Then to top it off, a last minute need for a 14 y/o boy's birthday card. 

Is there any category harder to make cards for than teen aged boys?  There is a SERIOUS lack of creative product geared towards this age group.  Teen girls?  Companies have got that covered.  Teen boys~~not so much. 

The only saving grace I had to work with is that Oldest Kiddo requested some type of basketball card.  Seeing as basketball is a year round sport in this household, I DO have some supplies to pull that off.  I decided to go fairly CAS (clean and simple) for a couple of reasons: 
A) This is for a 14 y/o boy.  Reality check: 14 y/o boys could care less about the card.  They only want to grab the Game Stop gift card inside and beg, plead and whine until their parent's take them to get the latest Call of Duty game.
B) It is late Saturday night and the Kiddo needs the aforementioned card before 8am Sunday. 

Here is what I came up with:

Do I even need to make another lame excuse for the lousy photo?  Late night photos do NOT work!

Card details:  Base is a5 1/2 square of SU's Blue Bayou (I think!).  Creamy Caramel is the next layer.  Design paper is from Karen Foster's Designs On the Line.  I have had this in my stash for a while.  I have NO idea if it is still available.  The basketball die is a Quikutz die.  The "orange" is actually SU's Dusty Durango with creamy caramel sponging to add dimensional shading. The star was die cut from some more Creamy Caramel card stock using Spellbinders Stars Five dies.  Distress ink Stormy Sky was used for the sponging and stamping.  The sentiment (from SU's Sporting) is actually in a straight line.  I masked off to stamp the sentiment in a vertical position, using my stampamajig to line the images up.  Last but not least, I used some Karen Foster stickers (I believe I may have bought the design paper and stickers as a package) to add the numbers "14" in the corner. 

Back to the basics.  It  works!

I hope that you all enjoy the rest of your weekend.  I'm going to see if I can knock out that anniversary card before The Toad takes me out to dinner!

'Till then...........................