Hello everyone, I hope you’ve had a good weekend. I’ve got a 50th birthday card to share with you today, made for one of my friends with a couple of the Open Numbers Masks and Spring Build a Wreath stamps. I love that you can get such fantastic results with these without any diecutting or layering!

First off, I cut a piece of stencil card to 5″ square and placed the 5 & 0 masks on it – I drew myself a light pencil guideline down the centre of the card (rubbing it out once the masks were down) and ran a piece of low tack tape across it so that I could line the masks up centrally and straight. I then created a border all round with the low tack tape and started stamping – first with a couple of the twiggy stamps in ‘gathered twigs’ Distress Ink.

I carried on stamping, using two of the larger flowers in ‘dried marigold’ and ‘salvaged patina’, then going darker with a small flower in ‘peacock feathers’.

I peeled one of the masks back a little to check that there was enough contrast across the background to highlight the numbers and decided that the background needed a little more adding. The solution was to lightly brush the ‘salvaged patina’ across it, which perfectly outlined the white numbers. I then simply added a mount of Antarctica companion paper, attached it to a 7×7 card blank and finished with one of the KISS word stickers

The key with this design is to get the number masks positioned at the start, and then the rest just flows. I took my colours from Just Add Ink (a bit of a different look from their inspo pic!), with the ‘create your own background’ themes at both Allsorts Challenge and Stencil Fun