Happy Birthday Lily

Today I wanted to share a card I made for a little girl who turns two this week, Lily.

However, I then realised I'd never shared her first birthday card!

This was quite a simple card, using an inky mop up background from the blending mat.

I added interest with these frame stamps from Stamps Away. I used dusty concord distress ink, to tie in with the background. I've never used these stamps as frames, but they make great abstract patterns.

To finish, I added the words in black archival, with the word chain "Happy Birthday" and the word chain alphabet stamps for the name. I edged with a purple sharpie.


This year's card is a little more involved.

I wanted to use the framework circles stencil from Clarity, I love this and the square one. They're so simple - nine apertures evenly spaced in a square - but so many things to do with them! For a 5x7 card, I only used 6 circles, masking the others.

(I took photos of the process, but they were completely blurred until the final steps! I guess the glossy stencil is hard for the camera to focus on.)

I used my oval petite gel plate to add ink to each aperture - a plain layer then a pattern with a stencil. For the green circles I used old paper and mowed lawn distress ink, with tattered rose and worn lipstick for the pink. The colours were Bethany's choice!

The stencils were the petite dotty wave, petite leafy swirl, petite script and zig zag, all from Clarity. I used a sponge to clean the ink off the stencil into the apertures, which gave a crisper edge to my inked circles.

I then added some stamping, using the small leafy swirl stamp from Clarity, and old paper, mowed lawn and worn lipstick inks. I used the circle stencils that come with the framework, the "waste", to ensure I didn't go into the adjacent apertures.

Having cleaned the stencil, I then added the words, using memento black ink.

I used the word chains as above. However, I decided to swap out the "B" in Birthday, for something a little prettier. I masked the B on the stamp when I inked up.

I was then able to add in the "B" from the alphabet stamps. You can see the difference by comparing to last year's card. which used the same stamps but unaltered.

I definitely had to mask the adjacent apertures when adding the words here!

The final stage was to cut down the card to the appropriate size, then edge. I struggled to find a colour to match, in the end I used the worn lipstick distress marker.

While I was making this, I got out the spine tag from an A5 folder I keep a lot of my A5 Clarity stamp sets in. It's printed on one side, but I turned it over, and added my waste ink, second generation stamping etc as I was going along. I edged with mowed lawn. I used the word chain alphabet stamps, and just had to dig out a "5" from another set.

So now I have a pretty label on my folder as well!