Mixed media collage card for a birthday

DH has a birthday this week!  I have not been in my craft room in quite a while because of other commitments and having a bit of a cold for just over a week!!  So I headed into my room hoping that something would come to me and I would get a card made. 
I started with a book page from a song book that has been discarded as he is an avid music fan.  I used my new stencils - large circles - to sponge a background all over it in blues. I dug through my scrap box and found the round heart elements which I cut out, sponged the edges with blue and glued to them to the book page.  In my scrap box I also found some coffee themed vellum - he loves his coffee - so I ripped that into strips and glued that down.  As you can see there was no real plan - I was just "going with it".  I wanted to echo the gold in the vellum and circles I had originally stencilled on so I used a polka dot stencil, applied gold pigment ink and the applied gold embossing powder and heated it all over.  I then used a polka dot embossing folder and embossed the whole background and then sponged on the same blue inks I had originally used to highlight the pattern randomly.  I laid my background over a large piece of black for contrast and found that the black border was a bit two stark so I gold embossed polka dots on the edges of before I glued them together.  I wanted to emphasize the collage aspect so I added washi tape to the bottom and top of the background securing the song sheet to the black.  I added a line of blue washi tape which I wanted to use to as a base for my focal element.  I like how well that worked.  As the main focal element I die cut a bare tree (TH SX) out of dark gray and embossed it with a gear embossing folder (TH).  I created a little embellishment using gold embroidery thread and two heart punchies and tied it to one of the tree branches and glued it to my layered background using white glue in a fine tip applicator.  I fussy cut a laser printed greeting, watercoloured it to coordinate with the heart embellishment and glued it over the trunk of the tree. Really liked that!!  It still needed a bit of something so I headed back to my scrap box and this die cut gold key caught my eye!!  I auditioned it and found that it balanced the tree quite well by positioning it below the base line of washi tape.  I mounted this large element to a large ivory card which I had sponged on the front edges with the same blue inks I had used to sponge the original background circles!!!!!!!  Pretty happy with how it worked out!!             Therese