Birthday Card for Melissa

I like using orange for Melissa's cards because she's a Vols fiend. And she loves irises, even has an iris tat in memory of her iris-growing granny. So I threw this card together, and promptly screwed up by assembling it wrong. And instead of doing it all over again, I opted to cut the original apart and put it on a slightly larger card base, which led me to create a homemade envelope, too!

I don't remember what the cardstocks are, although the replacement base was a Bazzill--that much I'm certain of. The others came out of stash. The stamp is either All Night Media after they went mass market or PSX, and of course it's gone walkabout (it's around here somewhere!). The ink is VersaFine Onyx Black.

It's colored with Prismacolor pencils, and I think the dies are from the HA "Infinity" rectangles. I think I've said before that I'm no fan of front-of-card sentiments, and only use them seldom.

The really fun part? I even asked her advice on what to do when you've mucked up your assembly. Her answer? Cry. Well, it didn't go that far, but it was a frustrating few days of pouting over the blunder before I decided to go slightly-larger-than A2 for this one, even though it meant the custom-made envelope--which also got stamped and colored, but I don't think I photographed that.

Edited 4/8 after the iris ended its walkabout: it's an old Hero Arts stamp.

I'm entering this in the Less is More #321 "Recipe" challenge.

Another Challenge to Enter!

This one is over at AAA Cards and is "blending."

This is actually on a cream card base, and the image is directly on the card base, so it qualifies as pure "clean and simple" as well as featuring the blending technique. It takes several passes with the die-cutting machine to get the acetate to cut all the way through all the way around, but acetate does make nice reuseable masks. For this I used the Spellbinders' Deckle Edge. The inks used for blending are from the Memento line of Tsukineko products: New Sprout, Pear Tart, Bamboo Leaves, and Cottage Ivy. The Hero Arts "grasses" image was stamped in Tsukineko's Versa Fine "Olympic Green."

Another Plea for Birthday Cards

This time it's for a young person whose next birthday is likely his last--his cancer is terminal. 

I used one of my favorites, the cupcake tower from Peddlers Pack, but it's been so long I'm not sure what ink I used. It looks like it may be Tsukineko's VersaMagic in "Gingerbread." No clue where the cream-colored card stock the image layer and card base are from. No clue where the striped stock is from. The "antiquing" is one of the Distress Inks from Ranger's Tim Holtz line, probably "Tea Dye." And the edges of the image layer were scraped with one of those distressing tools. The inside is pretty much the same, but the "Happy Birthday" image layer is tilted in the other direction. Happy birthday, Jacob.