More is More

The very last piece to the Divine Design gift set I’ve shared throughout the week is the birthday card.  I really had fun with this one…so much fun I got carried away and made it bigger than the envelopes I have.  LOL!  It’s 5.5″ square.

I knew I wanted to use some of the Cosmo Cricket Honey Pie paper to coordinate with the set and this striped berry pattern is one of my very favorites of the collection.  The orange paper is the solid side of one of the patterns.  I stamped the birthday image from Sweet Celebration by SASI on Poison Ivory shimmer cardstock and paper pieced the cake and the cuppie’s cupcake liner.  The rest was colored with copics.  Then I cut and embossed the image with a Nestabilities Label 1 die and with the die still in place I sponged on Sage Shadow ink.  Then I got to work with some fun and sparkle adding some embossed Prima flowers with an orange rhinestone brad center, some frilly stretchy ribbon I picked up at Hobby Lobby in Texas and some Zva Creative pink crystals.  And for just an added punch I added Dazzling Diamonds glitter to the cake as well as to the edges of the sage layer and the orange label layer. I did this with a Sakura Quickie Glue pen.  It’s a little hard to see in the photo, but oh-so-sparkly IRL.

Of course I had to finish off the inside of the card as well.

The little flower stamp is from SU Roses in Winter.  I just don’t know if I’ll ever give up that set!  I have to say that it’s so fun to pull color combos from different designer papers.  I end up using combos I wouldn’t come up with on my own.  In this card we have a pink Prism cardstock (similar to Pretty in Pink) along with Regal Rose, Sage Shadow and the orange dp (closest to Apricot Appeal).  I think it’s so feminine and fresh looking!

I have a confession to make.  And once I’ve made it, I hope you’ll still love me!  We got the photos from Megan and they’re awesome!  So last night we went on-line to order some wallet sized photos to include in our Christmas cards.  I need 100-120 cards in total.  I have sent out hand made cards every year for probably the last 10 years or so.  I have sometimes had to supplement with one box of store-bought cards (oh the horror), but even in the very stressful years of my aunt’s illness I managed to get mostly hand made cards mailed out.  This year I’m about 2/3 or maybe even 3/4 of the way to having my cards finished.  So when we were ordering photos I said “hey why don’t we order a set of 20 photo cards to supplement what I have made?”  Curt was fine with this idea – I’m the one who has a major problem with photo cards.  Don’t get me wrong – no offense to those people who send them every year – I realize they can be nice – but often they just seem to have nothing to do with Christmas and they aren’t even hand-signed usually….and well….it’s just my own personal problem and love of beautiful or adorable traditional Christmas cards….yes I realize I’m rambling….so I’ll just spit it out…we ended up ordering 80 of the photo cards.  Yep…80!  We’ve just never had such a nice photo of us (thanks Meg!) since our wedding (which btw – was the ONE year we did send out photo cards)…and I was feeling overwhelmed with it being so late and still having work to do on Christmas cards.  So a few people will get hand-stamped cards, but most will get a photo card this year.  I feel like I’ve broken a one of my own cardinal rules, but I hope you’ll still love me…in a stampin’ kinda way!  I promise to have all hand-stamped cards ready to go by the beginning of December in 2009!