a dragonfly and birthdays...

Hello!  Hope you had a nice weekend!  I actually felt like making some cards this weekend and I'm sharing three that I made.  First up is a card for Fusion card challenge.  I often forget about Fusion so I decided to see if what the current challenge was and just loved the inspiration photo.   So I had to play along.  I tried a couple of ideas that went into the garbage before settling on doing some very simple watercoloring with distress inks on watercolor paper.  I tried to make the area where I the watercoloring have some thing of an arc to it.   Once it was dry I stamped the hydrangea image from the Colorado Craft Company Big & Bold Get Well Hydrangea with VersaFine CLAIR Morning Mist ink.  The sentiment from the same set was stamped using VersaFine CLAIR Nocturne and then I die cut the piece with an AJVD rectangle die.   The dragon fly is from a Stampin Up! set called Dragonfly Dreams.  I stamped it using Catherine Pooler Suede Shoes ink, die cut it with the matching die and then die cut a detailed dragonfly from the pretty purple glitter cardstock that I used on another card a few days ago.  I adhered the two dragonflies together and then adhered it to my card front.  I finished with some purply-blue sequins.

The next two cards were created with the layout from CAS(E) this sketch in mind.   I created a card for the last CTS challenge and used the Concord & 9th Thankful Leaves turnabout stamp and die set.  There is a fun little banner die in the set along with dies that you can use to create a happy birthday sentiment.   I knew I wanted to use the dies on my card, but wasn't sure how I would use the dies that cut out birthday.  At first I did die cut them and was going to go with that, but then I decided to use the dies to hot foil the sentiment.  The first go didn't turn out well so I decided to try it again on light gray cardstock instead of the white that I had originally used.   The foiling went much better with that version, but I realized that I could save the first one and end up with two birthday cards!  I used the same purple glitter cardstock for the white version and black glitter cardstock from C9 for the grey version.    With both of them I die cut the word happy from the glitter cardstocks and then a second time from a scrap of white cardstock, layered then and adhered to the panels (after they had been die cut with an AJVD rectangle die).  The banners were die cut and then popped up with foam dimensionals.     Definitely very clean and simple!  That purple glitter paper is almost gone.  I really like it so I think I will have to purchase some more... now to remember where it came from, lol!

Thanks for stopping by and have a lovely day!