Hello stampers! I bought the Birthday Banners stamps set on a whim about two months ago and it is finally time to use it. I bought it because it coordinated with some banner framelits that I already have. I am going outside of my usual style and that is a good thing to do once in a while. You don’t want to get predictable, that’s boring! I don’t make enough cards suitable for kids, and these fit the bill for any age.

Now is a good time to take inventory of your stamping stash. You want to get the most use out of what you already have especially with your framelits and punches. Framelits will go on the clearance rack every now and then, but NEVER bundles. So you want to be sure that you have as many stamps as possible that coordinate with the framelits you already have because then you will use them more often. Is there a retiring colour that you really love? Make sure you have not only the card stock and the reinker, but also ribbon, twine and patterned paper that has that colour in it. On these cards I decided to use up my lemon lime twist. I love that colour, but as a demonstrator I will not be using it after May 31. No sense having someone fall in love with something they can’t buy!

I purposely took the picture of this card so that you could see the inside with the bright balloons. I even put string on them and tied them together to make it extra special. These balloons are in the Birthday Banners stamp set and they coordinate with our balloon punch to make it super simple to make a balloon bouquet. I cased this card from Michelle Zindorf, the queen of brayering. I didn’t brayer though, I sponged the background with blueberry bushel after embossing the swoosh from Star of Light in white. Michelle was a genius to think of the swoosh to make the candles look like they are being blown out! I embossed the candles in that gorgeous in colour embossing powder collection that is retiring. Here I used the lovely lipstick and pineapple punch embossing powders, great for the emboss resist technique.

Emboss resist simply means that you emboss your image first. That means that you stamp the image in versamark which is a sticky watermark ink. If you don’t add embossing powder you will just get a great tone on tone effect which is great for backgrounds. If you choose to emboss, then you sprinkle embossing powder on to your versamark stamped image, tap off the excess on to a clean coffee filter and then heat with the heat tool (which I call an embossing gun) After you have embossed your image you can sponge on ink or use a brayer and it will not stick to the embossed image. Do you see the blue on my one candle? That happened because the white part of the candle is not embossed. Next time I think I will cut out the candles and pop them up so that doesn’t happen. I could also have embossed the happy birthday but since this card is for my coffee and a card class I didn’t want to add too many steps. Do you see the fine detail in the swoosh from Star of Light? I love that you can use a Christmas stamp set for a birthday card. A lot of people have also used this swoosh as a Disney element (aka fairy dust) on cards or scrapbook pages. This stamp set is retiring as are the coordinating framelits.

I simply had to include this card even though it contains a glaring error that will have you laughing at me. Do you see what I did wrong on this card? I love the cute enamel dots, the raised banner with the two colours and the bright and cheerful candles. That banner cuts out with a framelit of course and there are two stamps so you don’t have to colour your stamp with a marker, also makes you look like a rock star. But when you stamp your candle flames upside down, well, that’s not such a bright idea is it?!! I really hope that maybe a few of you would have done the same thing.

I am going to stop this blog post now since I really, really want to go to pickleball, and it was canceled all of last week so I am in withdrawal. I also think my girth may be expanding due to lack of exercise! I will continue this post tomorrow including a new and improved version of this card in a different colour scheme of course as well as the last card in the trio. Thanks so much for stopping by, remember if you need to purchase anything and you live in Canada and are looking for a demonstrator, just click on the images below and you will end up at my online store. How easy is that?

Have a super day!!

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