A citrussy, crafty birthday

Do you get clusters of birthdays on your calendar? We do. I find I have loads of birthdays around Christmas – most of them are my downlines or other crafting friends. And right now is another heavy birthday season, with them coming thick and fast.

This one was for Ruby, who turned 18 last week and is a keen artist, so the Crafting Forever stamp set was just the job.

I began by watercolouring some citrussy colours onto watercolour paper, then die-cutting using the Happy Birthday Thinlits. I covered the whole lot in Versamark ink and then embossed using a mix of clear embossing powder and Dazzling Diamonds glitter.

I’m not a big glitter fan – it gets everywhere and is a nightmare if it ever goes down the drain as it can pollute our seas, so this is a great workaround for me as it keeps the glitter nicely contained.

The card is finished off with some paintbrushes and some splatters made with the Artisan Textures stamp set. Hope she likes bright colours!

Mix It Up Monday: Cat punch birthday card

Continuing my campaign to prove that you don’t need to celebrate Halloween to enjoy the new cat punch… here’s a fun birthday card in this week’s Mix It Up Monday colour combination from my In Color charts. It’s a great combo but I wish I’d made more of the Old Olive as it does get a bit lost.

Cat-wise, I’m loving the cat in an ombre Berry Burst – I knew I’d come round to colourful cats eventually. 

Happy Birthday Thinlits graffiti card

I never thought I’d have so much fun with this Happy Birthday die. I was only borrowing it from my friend Kelly, but now it’s on my list of must-haves.

I particularly like watercolouring a background and then cutting it out to create a multi-coloured greeting. Here I ’ve used Lemon Lime Twist and Emerald Envy.

It tops a graffiti-style card inspired by Julie Kettlewell.  I’ve used a bunch of stamp sets... In The City, Marquee Messages and Five For All. I wish I could say the card was appreciated but, as it was for a teenage boy, I think the money inside may have been of more interest!

Glittery embossing on Happy Birthday Thinlits

How’s this for a different look with the same stamp set? For this project, I took inspiration from another Artisan Design Team demonstrator (aim high, that’s what I always say), Paula Dobson. It was her gift bag which inspired me to create this funky card; the black really makes the colours pop.

We made this card at last week’s Crafty Friday event, which is a really relaxed class where we often try different techniques. This was actually the only card we made in the session, because there were many steps.

For the greeting, we began by painting some watercolour paper with bright colours – I used Melon Mambo and Lemon Lime Twist. When this was dry, we die-cut it using the Happy Birthday Thinlits die. It looked pretty fab, and you could leave it there, but we were having too much fun to stop, so decided to do some glittery embossing  on top.

We Versamarked the whole piece and added a mix of embossing powder and Dazzling Diamonds glitter to create a shiny and sparkly effect. It looks really cool. If you do this, keep your mix made up ready – I use about 60% embossing powder, 40% glitter (roughly!) but be prepared to keep topping up with embossing powder, as the glitter will begin to take over.

The background is stamped in Craft Whisper White ink and, in the absence of ribbon, I added a flower which was stamped on the leftover piece of watercolour paper. Ooh, that would have looked nice embossed, too.