Posh Birthday Cake Card

So after a month long break from crafting over the holidays, I finally made the first few tentative steps back into creating.  I have to admit that I was helped along by two fabulous treats in the post:

1. A new set of clear stamps featuring awesome build-your-own posh birthday cake pieces, decorations and sentiments, courtesy of the January issue of Papercraft Inspirations.

2. A box of prize goodies from a Stash Busters challenge I won a few months ago over on 2Peas.  Goodies included a 6x6 paper pad of Dear Lizzy Lucky Charm (awesome!), an Amy Tan phrase roller stamp, ribbon, puffy stickers and some decorations.

So I got to work playing with my new stamps, some watercolour paints and one of the papers from the Dear Lizzy pad as my card background.  And here we go:

 Posh Birthday Card

How cute is that cake?  There were some unfortunate imperfections with the cake stand and flower stamps where the acrylic had gaps but I was able to colour them in with a black fine liner pen.  I actually stamped the cake onto the back of some old single-sided patterned paper that I'm no longer particularly fond of - a great way to use up old scraps.  And since I still don't have any Pro Markers (really must get around to investing in some), I used watercolour paints to colour the cake and the edging of the circle to define the edge from that of the doily underneath.

The little pennants I made from a wash of the same watercolours and paper, which I then free hand cut into little triangles and stamped the recipient's name.  The piano key ribbon was part of a set of black and white prize winnings I received from a summer contest - even though there is nothing musical about the rest of the card, the occasion or the recipient, I think it works really well together.

Then I decided that I wanted to bring more of the pink onto the inside of the card so I made a quick wash of colour and stamped the sentiment over top of it.  It makes for a fun surprise when you open it up.