Teenager Card with a Basketball Theme

I've had this card in mind for a few weeks now.  My middle guy will be 13 this summer and he is so excited to be a teenager.  He's also a huge basketball fan (a dominant gene inherited from his father).  I really wanted to make a card to emphasize the fact that Jack will be a teen, so designed things to make the "TEENAGER" stand out on the card.

I wanted to use the biggest basketball I could.  After playing around a bit, I decided that the best option would be to create a ball too large for the card and just have a portion showing.  Using Design Studio, I positioned the portion I wanted at the top of my mat to avoid wasting paper during cutting.  (I only cut what I needed.)  I used my Basketball cartridge for this.

I also used the Basketball cartridge for the shirt.  As Jack will become a teenager, I put the number 13 on the back of the shirt.  I used Opposites Attract for the number.

I used a few fonts for TEENAGER.  For the shadow, I welded the majority of letters together (all but the T).  The T was cut with George and Basic Shapes.  I also cut the inside portion of the T using the silhouette feature.  As it did not fit the shadow and regular cut letter properly, I did a bit of stretch work in Design Studio.  Most of the other letters were cut with Printing Press, but the G was done with Alphalicious.  The letters were cut at different sizes as well.

I hand cut a couple of little flags and stamped them with sentiments from a banker's stamp set that I have (brand unknown).  I used a star brad from my stash.  I also ran the background paper through my Cuttlebug star folder.  The shirt and letters were attached with PopDots.

I also used the Basketball cartridge to create the sentiment and basketball for the inside of the card.  The inked portion of the sentiment was done with a Hero Arts stamp and ink from Stampin' Up.  I used the same papers as I had used on the front.  To carry the look, I used some of the background paper and punched it with an EK Success border punch.  I ran it through the Cuttlebug star folder as well. 

Patterned papers are all from Stampin' Up.  The card base and green and blue cardstocks are Recollections and the orange is Bazzil.  I had initially planned to use some dark grey (instead of green) with the orange on the basketball but didn't really care for the look with the other papers.  When I saw the InLinkz challenge,  I changed my original plan in order to fit their colour scheme requirements for the challenge.  I'm much happier with the green!

Now to wait until August to give it to my newest teenager!