My Grandson celebrated his very first birthday last summer. My family have been on the receiving end of my hand made cards for quite a few years now. There is always an increased pressure when special birthdays come along. Well, you can’t get more special than your first Grandchild’s first birthday can you? I wracked my brains for ideas for his card and then I had a brainwave. His mum (my daughter) loves the Very Hungry Caterpillar story book and so does Charlie, he has lots of toys, books and even clothes featuring the character. I decided to use that as my theme to create a card in a similar style using a host of dies from my stash and a home made template for the accordion card base. I had the idea of the caterpillar eating his way through the card but, how to create that was another matter. It took days of experimenting, creating numerous templates for the caterpillar and the accordion style card base until eventually I arrived at one I was happy with. Days more were spent die cutting all of the elements, including the caterpillar from a multitude of dies and different colours of card stock, when I didn’t have the right colours I used alcohol markers. All elements were inked around the edges to create depth. The completed card was huge and too thick when folded to go into an envelope so I made a box for it. This will also help to keep it safe in his memory box for years to come. To give you an idea of the size of this, each page of the accordion is A5, the whole thing was 21 cm tall and 118 cm long. This was most definitely a labour of love that I will Not be recreating for anyone else unless, of course, I happen to have another Grandchild in the future.