Birthdays and Backgrounds

I've got an upcoming article in Die Cutting Essentials where I used Concord and 9th's Empire Inlay die on one of my backgrounds using a few different shades of greens and teals. Because I cut one in each colour way this meant I had lots of bits left over so I thought I'd play around with some different options for some different backgrounds with them.

For the first, because I'd also got white inners left, I decided to just go for clean crisp white and green. I thought this would be good for those tricky masculine cards so went very simple with it to make it into a card - I just added an oval with a die cut sentiment over the top.

For the second card I thought it would be fun to pair the masculine lines of the background with some softer floral elements so I die cut a collection of flowers and leaves from Concord and 9th's Primrose Garden die (might be my favourite die to play with at the moment!) I added some shading on the larger elements and chopped the biggest flower in half so I could pop them above and below the central ribbon banner.

I was left with two coloured borders and one set of coloured inners so I used one of the frames to fit the pieces into but without glueing them down. Once it was filled I used a sheet of Press-n-Seal on the front so I could hold all the bits but take away the frame. I flipped it over, added glue and stuck to my base card, allowed to dry then removed the press-n-seal. This is an easy way to line up die cut bits and a technique I love. On this ocassion is gives a different look to the inlay die - gives me tiki cup vibes. Not sure what I want to put on this card yet - so I'm leaving it just as a plain background for a future project.

Now for the final two frames I thought I'd play around and see if I could work with them on one card. I glued the darkest to the card base and then by cutting up the shapes in the lighter shade I found I could lay them next to the same shapes in the design to give a double geometric look - this one gives me deco vibes and again felt quite masculine so I went with another simple banner sentiment (from the Primrose Garden Die)

Hope that's given you some idea for ways to play with the Inlay Dies. Let me know if you spot the card with the original background when it appears in Die Cutting Essentials next month.

NEWS FROM THE STORE

We have an order from Altenew pending - just waiting on a shipping confirmation but we hope it will be here this week. Lots of new goodies plus all the restocks requested in the last month that were currently available.

The Greetery has a new release at the end of the month that we hope to have for release day or very shortly thereafter if customs don't play ball.

Happy Crafting!

Tara