Card making

A Binary Birthday Card

MrsCraft

I do love a good challenge, and each year the card for my brother in law’s birthday gets me. After all the Christmas crafting I’m always totally unprepared (and distinctly lacking in creativity) when it comes to January birthdays. He is a computer programmer, and I’ve seen a few designs where you paper piece a computer screen etc. I like the idea, but I really couldn’t muster the enthusiasm for it. Then a light bulb came on (ok, maybe just a small spark). I could write the message in binary code! Simple, effective, and only he (and his colleagues) would ‘get’ it.

This opened up a whole can of worms, how on earth do you translate into binary code? I mean, there’s language translators for French and so on, but who really reads computer language? (Apart from computer whizzes!) A quick Google search found me a translator, and I typed in my message, which I duly copied and pasted into a text box which I had already made to the size I wanted to print. At that point, paranoia struck. What if the translator was wrong? I copied and pasted my billions of numbers back into another translator to reverse the process, then checked again. How embarrassing would it be to send the wrong letters? And  it hadn’t even occurred to me that capital H in binary would have a different code to lower case. Once I was satisfied that I wasn’t writing gobbledegook, I changed the font, printed it, trimmed and matted onto silver mirror card and some black and grey spotty paper from the Docrafts MrMister range. A super quick card, once I’d worked out the message. It’s not fancy, but it is special.

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The possibilities for this are quite literally endless, you can write any message (even more ‘colourful’ language). A secret message between you and the recipient, a hilarious joke, anything you fancy! Mr C tried to encourage me to add a sweary message at the bottom but I had already made it (and I didn’t want to risk accidentally translating anything else wrong!) Here is a link to the Binary Code translator I used, in case you fancy trying this out for yourself.

The card has been opened and received so I can finally post it here, it went down very well (and the recipient was in agreement with Mr C that it needed some rude words!)

28 thoughts on “A Binary Birthday Card”

  8. Absolute genius! I have said this to you before, but I think these are the best kind of cards – truly personal ones. Actually in my experience I think men really appreciate them too. Either the humour, or because someone took time to do it, or the originality, maybe. Anyway, I LOVE it!

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