Hello everyone. We’ve got our new challenge at Addicted to Stamps & More for you and this time round our theme is ‘birthdays’. So many possibilities with this one and I went for a pretty panel using Set 6 from the Floral Elements collection – the brilliant things about these stamps is that each set comes with four swatches to give you ideas for layouts. Never being one to waste an opportunity, I used one of them for this card.

I took a 3.5″ square of Clarity’s premium card and masked off a panel with low tack tape. I then repeat stamped the cluster of flowers and leaves to fill it, before edging the panel with a micron pen – I don’t have the steadiest hand, so did this before removing the low tack tape so I could run the pen along it.

Next was to add the colour – obviously with my Polychromo pencils! I blended ‘dark cadmium yellow’ and ‘cadmium orange’ on the daisies, using the orange again on the roses, with a little ‘light cadmium red’ for depth, blending the orange over it. The leaves were done with a blend of ‘earth green yellowish’ and ‘permanent green olive’.

I stamped one of the sentiments from the set then mounted the topper on a piece of Indian Summer companion paper. I used a square embedder and a ball tool to emboss a frame on the front of a 5×5 card blank and sat the topper within it.

These layouts are such a helpful tool to have – I followed this one almost to the letter (or should that be flower…?), just switching the sentiment. How will you choose to celebrate birthdays with us at ATSM?

In addition to the design swatch, I picked up inspiration from a couple of other challenges for my card, starting with the floral CAS theme at The Paper Players and using the colours from Color Dare