Backporch: Happy Birthday Fred!

Sorry that I have been absent from the blog for so long. Many of you who know me know that Art 'n Soul, the shop where I have worked the last 6.5 years, recently closed and I have been super busy with helping to facilitate that for a while. I have promised my customers that I will continue to post to my blog, and I will try to post more often.

Other than the shop closing, I've had a wonderful year, including a trip to Holland and Iceland. I had a lot of lovely company this summer also. All through that time I shopped (many of my guests were artists and stampers, and I had to take them around, didn't I?) and acquired lots of stamps, dies, stencils, inks, paper, etc. I decided to put all of my new stamps and dies in a box (and then I had to get a larger box). I'm going to try to use everything in the box before I put those things in their places in my bins. That might mean that next summer you may see things I acquired this past summer. Sorry about that, but I'm determined to use everything!

To kick it off, I used a new die from Poppy for a birthday card for a dear friend from Holland. I'm sure he would not mind my posting it here.

I wanted to keep it simple because of mailing it to Holland, and no sequins or glitter because..guy card.

I die cut a panel of white linen textured cardstock using the largest of the Lawn Fawn Small Stitched Rectangle Stackables LF768.

I then used the Poppy die 1949 Oak Leaf Oval Collage, that is new this Fall. I really like collage type dies. I placed the die right in the center of my panel and cut it out.

Behind the Oak Leaf panel, I mounted a piece of Yupo paper that I had covered with alcohol inks in Turquoise, Pool, Mermaid, Amethyst and Raspberry.

For the sentiment, I stamped the Dutch Happy Birthday sentiment from the Magenta Multilingual Happy birthday stamp 07.907.L. I actually have several of this stamp, and I cut apart one of my cling ones. It has Happy Birthday sentiments in English, French, Icelandic, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese and Russian. If I don't have room for all of them on a card, I like to be able to use just the one I want. I stamped it with Versafine Deep Lagoon (when oh when will the new Versafine Clair colors be out in this country)?

I mounted the panel onto So Silk Glamour Green cardstock and then onto a 110# Neenah Solar White base card. I hope you like it!

Magenta Stamps Used: