Celebrate--with Cake!

The current challenge at Virginia's View challenge blog is "Layers & Dimension." I decided to make a birthday card to send to Operation Write Home.

I began by choosing OWH's Sketch #206:

I thought the cake from the "Wish Big" stamp set, designed by Julie Ebersole, would fit perfectly in the smaller circle, surrounded by the "celebrate" from the same set. I die cut and embossed both circles with dies from Spellbinders' "Standard Circles LG" & "Standard Circles SM" sets. I stamped the cake on the smaller circle using Ranger Archival Watering Can ink, and colored it with watercolor pencils & a damp paintbrush. It was at that point that I realized I'd forgotten to leave room to stamp the candles on the cake! Rather than start over, I penciled in some lines from the top of the cake, poked a hole at either end of each line, and stitched the candles with embroidery floss in 4 different colors. I added the flames with a gold gel pen, and applied small dots of Glossy Accents over each flame. Problem solved--whew! :)

To stamp the "celebrate" around the larger circle, I used my MISTI and one of the templates created by a stamper named Cyndie, shared on this blog post. I curved the stamp slightly, and stamped it a few times around the larger circle, using Versafine Onyx Black ink and overlapping the ends slightly to make it look like one continuous stamp. Then I set that aside while I worked on the rest of the card.

For the background, I embossed a piece of green cardstock with the Cricut/Cuttlebug "Juli's Garden" embossing folder. I matted that with a darker green cardstock. I cut a piece of patterned paper from my scrap stash for the panel on the right side. I matted it with magenta & blue cardstocks, before adhering it--partially over the larger circle--onto the background. I glued the smaller circle on top, and finally mounted the entire thing to a white A2-size card base.