Welcome to my crafty blog. A friend of mine asked me to make a birthday card for her daughter, and this is it! I’ve used several of Julie Hickey’s stamps for this one, and based it on a card I made last year, although I’ve stepped it up a bit. (You can check out the original here)

I started in the same way as the previous one, by stamping Julie’s ‘birthday background’ onto a large square of white card, then blending inks onto it – I’ve used ‘dried marigold’ & ‘barn door’ Distress Oxides this time. Before stamping the words, I’d marked some guide points from a nested heart die in pencil, so I got it in the right place.

I cut the heart die into the front of a 7×7 card blank (I had to use my Gemini for this as the card was too wide to go through my smaller cut & emboss machine). I then positioned the stamped card behind it, so the words filled the aperture. You’ll see that the stamp is not quite wide enough to cover the whole space, but I knew the flowers and leaves would disguise that.

I stamped the flowers from Julie’s ‘daisy blooms’, together with several of the leaves from ‘fresh florals, and coloured them using Distress Oxides and a waterbrush – ‘dried marigold’ & ‘barn door’ for the flowers and ‘peeled paint’ for the leaves. I die cut the leaves and fussy cut the double flower hear, then attached them along the right hand side of the heart.

The sentiment is from Julie’s ‘mandala’ set – I stamped it in the ‘peeled paint’ and trimmed it down with scissors before attaching it on foam pads.

It has a lovely autumnal feel – perfect for an October birthday. I’m going to share this with a couple of current challenges – the colours are the closest I had to CAS Colours & Sketches‘ palette and I think the heart aperture nicely picks up the theme from TGIF challenges