cake and balloons!

Hello and happy Friday!  We are having lovely weather here in the Puget Sound region and that makes me happy!  The Mountain is out and that makes me even happier, lol!  Plus my niece and her little are visiting this weekend so now I'm really happy!  Anywho... I do have cards to share and they are both birthday cards.  First up is a card that I made for a dear friend who will be celebrating her birthday early next week.  She loves pink and so when I saw the colors from Color Throwdown I knew I wanted to use them to make her card.  I pulled out the Stampin Up! Sale-A-Bration Happy Birthday to You stamp set as it has that sweet flower covered cake.  I stamped the cake on watercolor paper with VersaFine Clair Morning Mist ink and then colored the image with distress inks in Picked Raspberry, Mowed Lawn, Squeezed Lemonade, Fossilized Amber (flower centers) and Broken China.  When the image was dry I die cut it with the insert die from the Becca Feeken Sentimental Finery Flourished Fretwork set.  I used the largest die from the same set to die cut the rectangle from off white cardstock.   I decided to emboss the sentiment from the set on vellum using white embossing powder, wrapped the strip around the panel and then secured it on the back.  I adhered the outer rectangle with glue to a pink cardstock base and then popped the image panel up with foam tape.  I finished off the card by adding some light yellow Pretty Pink Posh gems to each corner of the outer rectangle.   Going to add this to the Simon Says Stamp Wednesday challenge.

The second card is for Freshly Made Sketches and this month's Altenew inspiration challenge.  I used the Mini Delight Birthday Love stamp and die set.  I stamped the balloons using Altenew Starlight crisp ink.  The funny thing is two of the balloons are the same color, but the third one turned out a little darker! Anyway after diecutting the balloons I attached some brown string to the back of each one and let them dry.  I have had a hard time with the color combo for the inspiration challenge, but when I saw the beautiful card my friend Greta made using kraft cardstock I decided to give it a try. Glad I did!  I cut a piece of kraft cardstock and then did partial embossing using my craft hammer.  Once I had enough embossing I then swiped some distress oxide ink in vintage photo over the embossing to bring it out more.  I die cut some white cardstock using the largest rectangle die from the AJVD stitched dot rectangles die set and adhered the kraft strip.  To give it some height I added scrap cardstock strips to the back instead of using foam tape.   The balloons were adhered with a combination of glue and one well placed foam dimensional.  I stamped the sentiment from another Altenew stamp set on white cardstock with the same Starlight ink, trimmed it down and then adhered it to the card front.  I also added a dot of glue to the balloon strings to keep them in place.

Thanks for stopping by and have a wonderful day!