A happy birthday and house warming card

My good friend Linda bought a new "old" house a month ago and we have been painting and laying floors for the last few weeks to get the house in the colours she wants. She also turned 37 this weekend, so I thought I would give her a birthday and housewarming present in one. With the house she also got a big garden with a lot of lawn, flowers, threes and a lot of bushes. She got a lot of equipment to make her garden beautiful. With presents there has to be a card and since I am in to scrapping and card makeing I had to make a card. Linda is the one who introduced me to scrapping and she is like 100 times better at it than I am, so the card had to be special.
I follow several bloggs about scrapping and  found this amazing card looking like a suitcase at "Annes paper fun" , she makes the most amazing creations. She is lucky to have Tim Holtz suitcase dices for a sizzix machine which I don't, but I printed out her photos and drew myself some templates and cut it out by hand. It was a hell of a job, but I am quite satisfied, especially since I hate meticulous jobs like that.

To select colours for the project I usually start with finding a head piece,in this case the label with home sweet home. Then I could figure out the colour scheme of the project, I must admit that my favorite colours are turquoise and brown.

The heart is from a necklace I bought on sale and dismantled.

I love using page from used books with different fonts, this piece of paper actually have a norwegian text, but usually I buy second hand books and I go to fleemarkeds and buy books in different languages.

I also like the motto "carpe diem", seize the day!

Here I have used the bottle cap of a champagne bottle.