ISO a adult male birthday collection

Good luck. There just isn't much of anything for adult men in scrapbooking.

You could make a box card with elements related to hobbies and interests, or make a card with some other interactive feature. Here is a link to a few of the box cards that I have made in case you aren’t familiar with box cards (I was going to post the images here, but they were really huge):

3 Box Card examples

The Lawn Fawn Iris Card die set helps you to make a card for any occasion that will provide a lot of “wow” factor that you can tailor to any recipient. This is the birthday card that I made for my DH using the Lawn Fawn Iris die set and Heartfelt Creations papers:

Masculine Iris Card

I haven’t looked lately, but from time to time, Graphic 45 has had designs and embellishments that are elegant or classic (as opposed to the frequent cutesy lines from other companies that seem more for children). I have used Graphic 45 to make manly cards more than once. It doesn’t have to have a birthday theme. I’ll use my computer to design my own sentiment.

Do you have an electronic cutter? Silhouette has a wide variety of designs for making birthday cards and/or birthday embellishments. They also often include the option of buying .svg so that you can import it to other electronic cutters such as Cricut. The box cards in the link that I gave above were created using cutting files from Silhouette and from SVG Cuts.

You can use clip art from the internet, too, or digital images, although you might have to cut them out by hand.

There is so much out there that is too childlike or juvenile, so if I see a stamp, die, papers, or other embellishments that I can use for birthday cards for my DH and grown kids, I usually buy it/them immediately for later use.

I don’t know why I thought you were looking for card ideas, but it sounds like grammadee may have thought the same. You can use some of the same suggestions for layouts, though, as well as cards.

I think your layouts turned out great!

Great suggestion!  I may have to pick up some of this also!  The wood pieces and stickers especially would be great since OP was looking for embellishments!  

Not a criticism, just a wish.

I wish we could refer to collections by something like 'darker colored collection' or 'cool colored collection', or 'woodsy' or 'grown up' etc. instead of 'masculine' and 'feminine'. It just perpetuates the stereotypes that paper manufacturers are already too OTT with.

If we would stop, maybe they would figure out other ways to do themes than the same recycled themes, color pallets and boy/girl that they've done for 3 decades.

While they are at it, I wish they'd do a MY birthday line.  So none of this "your birthday" on everything... and it better not have quotations about being old on it!   

But cool colored can still be way too flowery and end up looking "feminine."  The link to the post above yours still has 1/2 the pages with flowers (or cabbages?) on it that make it look like they were trying too hard and they put wolves coming out of flowers.  It just looked odd.  

I am someone who generally stays away from pink and flowery unless it is on a beach/summer or garden page.  I want lines that are bold and colorful without icons that scream one sex would really like this paper.  I think manufacturers will always play to the pink and flowery audience because that is just what sells.  

There's a good site that allows you to download and print your own papers.

www.scrapbookscrapbook.com

It's free and you can adjust the size to print them however you want.

Once you're on the site, look at the top of the list on the left and click on "See all our printables". They're arranged in categories, so it's easy to find something specific.

I've used this site several times to print papers - usually for one of the men in my family.