My brother’s birthday is in a couple weeks and I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss it (like I did last year).

I thought this beer set would be perfect for his card. I had fun adding little touches – the foam on the beer and water drops on the glass. The foam was done with a puffy paint. The water drops are done with a clear lacquer. I made the drops too big – and I wish I had set the image on its edge to have the drops run a bit instead of being perfectly round; live & learn.

The “celebrate” sentiment is a negative die cut. I didn’t go the easy route of putting a white die cut on top of the pattern paper…no, I had to die cut the word out of the pattern paper panel. To make it stand out, I backed the pattern paper with white card stock and then pieced the little elements in the letter loops back into the sentiment.

Thanks for taking a peek!

Today is Papertrey Ink’s May 2016 Blog Hop Challenge. The inspiration photo was awesome and as soon as I saw it, I knew what I wanted to do. Here is the inspiration:

And here is my card:

Even though I knew what I wanted to do, I still had trouble! On my first try, I picked 3 shells and repeated them (2 to a row, not 3), but I found that I didn’t space it very well and the repetition didn’t layout well. So I tried again, but messed up immediately by stamping in the wrong space.

This card is my third try and even this had problems. The pink shell was stamped in the wrong order so the third layer is hard to see. While I paid more attention to the spacing when stamping, I still left too big a margin on the left so I trimmed 1/8″ off (still is a bit off center, but not as badly).

I thought the sentiment die would just go right on, but because it is two lines, it made the spacing of the seashells feel off. So I die cut the sentiment twice and trimmed the words apart and laid them between the seashell lines.

Despite all the trouble – I love this card (and the stamps & die)!!

Thanks for taking a peek!