Just for you on your birthday

For my card today, I've paired up some of the new items from The Greetery's recent birthday release with a couple of versatile sets from Concord & 9th.

When you need a background for your card, Turnabout stamps are often the perfect solution.

I already had a colour palette in mind for this project, so I grabbed the Paint Swash Turnabout set and the new and improved All-in-One Turnabout Jig from Concord & 9th and stamped an A2 background that I could later trim down to use on my card.

The Paint Swash Turnabout set also includes separate stamps for adding the spotty and striped details. So you can go really bold and use black ink for those accents, or omit them completely for a subtle pattern.

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Next it was time to create the star of the show with the new Takes the Cake Mini die set from The Greetery. There are so many fun elements in this set for creating all sorts of fancy cakes – you've got icing details, layers for rainbow cakes, a banner, the little candles, and the cake stand.

I wanted to replicate the look of a fancy marbled/ombré effect on my cake. So I cut the cake from cream cardstock and used a small blending brush to stipple light teal ink over the cake for a mottled look.

I cut the icing from glittery cream cardstock and added some grey shading to the cake stand base.

To colour the candles, I reached for a very handy little stamp set that I often use to add blocks of colour or patterns to small die-cuts. I used the solid rectangle in the Playful Patterns set to stamp yellow and teal rectangles one on top of the other on a scrap piece of white cardstock. There's a notch in the candle die that makes it easy to line up the flames over the yellow, and cutting the candles this way round instead of colouring them later is much less fiddly and also means the colouring is nice and uniform.

The recent projects showcased by Betsy from The Greetery used coloured vellum in some very creative ways. But my stash of coloured vellum from circa 2004 has long-since been donated elsewhere. So I decided to make my own coloured vellum to match the pink tones in the background.

I grabbed a piece of plain Lawn Fawn vellum and rubbed a Saltwater Taffy Distress Ink pad over the vellum, removing the excess ink with a microfibre cloth between applications until I reached the intensity I wanted. The vellum was also dry to the touch after rubbing with a microfibre cloth, so no need to zap with a heat gun and potentially warp the vellum.

Top tip: If you want to die-cut your DIY coloured vellum, pop it between two pieces of printer paper before running it through your die-cutting machine with a die. This will ensure no ink is transferred to your cutting plates, and no fuzzy bits embedded in your cutting plates get stuck to the vellum.

For extra pop and texture, I snipped into my die-cut vellum circle with a pair of scissors creating a fringed effect.

I then popped the vellum circle on one of the Crimped Circle dies from The Greetery with a blob of glue hidden by the mini cake.

Finally, for my greeting I combined a sentiment from the original Tear Strip Tags stamp set with the new Tear Strip Banners die.

Until next time, happy crafting!