STAMPTACULAR #121 "Hot Pockets" with The Paper Shelter and multiple challenge entries

When I started my card for this week's
Stamptacular Sunday Challenge
10 days ago - I just couldn't seem to make it work.    I loved the fun image, kindly supplied by The Paper Shelter - our sponsor this week who is offering a $10 gift certificate to our lucky winner but I was seriously foxed by our challenge which is "Hot Pockets".   We want to see a card or project with a pocket in it.  You just need to show us where the pocket is and what’s inside! Oh…and don’t forget to stamp! After all, we don’t call this STAMPtacular for nothing!
I realise there are all sorts of pocket cards.  If you need some inspiration - just pop over to our site.  But I couldn't get the picture of an actual pocket - like on jeans or a shirt - out of my mind so first of all I took my shorts off, popped them in my printer and scanned them with the idea that I could then print the image onto coloured paper and use it as my background!
But that didn't work - the pocket was pretty visible but there was too much fabric and it wrinkled and the shadows made the printed image look grey and dirty.  Frankly - it was pants!
So then I decided to cut out a pocket shape with my Cricut by welding a square to a semicircle.  I wanted to enclose a predominantly green tag in the pocket so it had to be large enough to accommodate the tag and when I placed the cut shape on my chosen DP (which is from my DCWV Citrus stack) - it took up almost the whole card and looked flat and ridiculous.  It needed some extra dimension so I cut out another rectangle just for the top of the pocket.  It still looked flat and huge. 
Add stitching, thought I.   Unfortunately, the mini sewing machine I got 6 months ago just for card making remains unused in a corner because I haven't been able to work out how to thread the darn thing so I opted for faux stitching and pricked about 100 holes before doodling the thread  (it's deliberately a bit uneven because I wanted it to look like how I might really stitch).  Still the card looked like something of nothing with a huge yellow pocket taking up most of the space on the front of my card. 
So I worked on the tag for a bit, coloured up my image, cut borders with some different EK Success punches for decoration and mounted it all on a Go-Kreate die-cut tag shape using more of my DCWV Citrus stack.
At the time I didn't know for whom I was making the card and I find it so hard to be creative when I don't have a recipient in mind and whereas I really liked my finished tag, my huge yellow pocket was still screaming out for something.  
Finally I cracked it when it became a birthday greeting for the eldest of my nephews who never has any money and this is the finished card.      ...And with the tag visible:

I played with The Paper Shelter image in photoshop for the front of my card, removing the bird and replacing the resulting blank space with duplicates of some of the leaves which I cut, resized and pasted.  I only wanted the bird's bill (which I photoshopped back in to the corner) to be just visible to go with my sentiment which is Word processed.   Then I added a sentiment (also Word processed) to the tag and decorated the back. 

My images are coloured with Copics and Promarkers.  A little button just finished off the pocket which looks so much better now it has a picture on it and I added a Papermania ribbon to the tag.

I am absolutely delighted with my finished product and I'm sure that my nephew will like it too!
I am entering my card into the following challenges:
The Paper Shelter - "colour green" - there is a lot of green it's just that the brighter colours outshine it.
Charisma Cards - "sunshine colours"
CES Challenge - "humour/funny"
A Spoon Full of Sugar "create a tag"
Totally Gorjuss - "punch or die"
Creative Card Crew "animal antics" - I still believe that birds are animals too!