Welcome back to the blog!

Today I’m sharing a fun birthday card I recently made for my brother. I had three pieces of inspiration for it which were: 1) his favorite color is lime green, 2) I had just purchased an amazing confetti stencil from Simon Says Stamp, and 3) I wanted to use the Birthday Puppies stamp set from Waffle Flower that was in my stash for ~a year and I hadn’t used yet (and luckily my brother, like myself, is a dog lover). This was the perfect trifecta, and this cute card was knocked out fairly quickly.

With lime green in mind, I ended up picking out some ink cubes to use from Simon Says Stamp and settled on Jellybean, Audrey Blue, and Deep Sea. These three colors play really well together, so I ended up using them as a guide for how I was going to color my images. When using this stencil, I’m not sure if there’s a correct order of which layer to use first, but I ended up going smallest confetti to largest. When I use this stencil again, I think I’ll use it starting with the largest confetti layer first since that kind of overtook some of the smaller confetti, and I think it would look good with the smaller confetti blended on top of it. That said, I love this stencil. It’s super easy to use, the price point is good, and it can be used for a variety of occasions.

Next, I chose three of the puppies from the stamp set and stamped them using Simon Says Stamp Intense Black ink, which is perfect to use when coloring with alcohol markers. For each color I chose to use on my images, I made sure to use two shades of it so I could add a little bit of dimension to the images. As I’ve shared in other blog posts, I haven’t bought Copic markers yet due to the price of them (I know they are worth it, but I haven’t felt comfortable spending on them yet), but I have found a good alternative from Amazon. The ones that I use are this 72 color set (Amazon.com : Ohuhu Alcohol Markers Brush Tip - Double Tipped Art Marker Set for Kids Artist Adults Coloring Sketching Illustration - 72 Colors w/ 1 Colorless Alcohol-based Blender - Chisel & Brush Tips - Honolulu : Arts, Crafts & Sewing) as well as this 24 color set that has a good variety for skin tones (Amazon.com : Ohuhu Skin Tone Alcohol Markers Brush Tip - Double Tipped Skin Color Markers for Artist Adults' Coloring Illustration - 24 Portrait Skin Colors w/ 1 Alcohol Based Blender, Chisel & Brush - Honolulu : Arts, Crafts & Sewing).

After coloring and die cutting my images, I decided I wanted something to mat them on, so I die cut an oval from my Nesting Ovals die set from Waffle Flower out of Sprout cardstock from Concord & 9th. Waffle Flower has a great variety of nesting die sets with a variety of sizes in each set, and I feel these dies are a worthwhile investment. After cutting out the oval piece, I glued it down as well as my colored images. I decided to stamp the sentiment ‘happy barkday’ from the stamp set in the same Intense Black ink from SSS. Lastly, I finished the card off with some Twinkle Twinkle embellishments from Trinity Stamps.

I have to share some inspiration from Cathy Zielske using this stencil since seeing these projects made me buy it:

And that wraps up this post! I hope you love the cute pups and fun colors as much as I do. Thanks for stopping by, and I’ll catch you next time!