Birthday card for Kai - 2021

Today is Kai's Birthday - Mum to Len's two grand daughters. Most of you know that the family lives in Germany - and, like us, have been in and out of lockdowns until they're dizzy.

In honour of Kai's Birthday, I broke open a new Stamping Up set of stamps and matching dies, bought a while back - to have a play. After so long away from serious crafting I forgot how to set stamps onto the Misti! No worries, not losing the plot - just not concentrating properly and so ended up putting them on face up instead of face down.

This is the card I came up with - I worry it's a 'bit old fashioned' for a gal in her 40's - but Len gave it his 'stamp' of approval at least - and Dudley gave one of his interested and approving dabs of his nose when I showed it to him:

I used:

- A6 white card blank

- piece of Neenah 'Desert Storm' card stock as a contrast to the pink striped background I added later. Initially I hoped to make the card blank using the 'Desert Storm' card but it isn't thick enough so I resorted to cutting a piece a smidgen smaller than the card front and glueing that in place

- then die cut a pink striped panel from a piece of paper from Dovecraft's Back to Basics 'Bright Spark' paper pack - it's pale pink and not at all bright so I reckon it crept into the paper pack when no-one was looking! I used a die from a Heffy Doodles A6 stitched rectangles set of dies - huge thanks again to Sarn for initially finding these and subsequently enabling 'Little Miss Copy Cat' to follow suit - I love the delicate 'stitching' as well ☺

- next, used the Stamping Up 'Wrapped Bouquet' set of stamps to stamp the bouquet, newspaper wrap and little tag sentiment - all using Memento 'Tuxedo Black' ink and my smallest Misti

- die cut the stamped elements using the Stamping Up 'Wrapped Flowers' set of dies then flipped the newspaper wrap over and stamped on the reverse  - I followed a YouTube tutorial to work out how some of it was done, otherwise I'd still be sitting here pondering!

- coloured the bouquet itself using Polychromos pencils and added some Clear Wink of Stella

- die cut extra green and white foliage, using snippets, for later on

- now we finally had lift-off - I'd begun to wonder to be honest

- as per the video I folded the newspaper wrap into shape and tucked then adhered the bouquet of flowers into the 'wrap'. It already was looking good - hooray!

- tucked and adhered the additional die cut foliage in place - at this point the 'bouquet' was still a stand-alone element

- added the tiny 'For You' tag using a snippet of beige embroidery thread

- did a hunt for a suitable sentiment and ended up using a Craftwork Cards pre-printed and die cut oval 'Happy Birthday' which I glued onto the top left hand corner

- I'd already worked out the positioning for the bouquet so then added that using some red line tape behind the 'newspaper wrapping' and thin sticky pads behind the bouquet itself so that it all sat nice and level 

- final touch, three white pearls 

I'm adding this into Darnell's NBUS challenge - the stamps and dies are on their first trip out!