Happy Birthday AAA Cards!

YAY!!!! It's finally here -our fabulous 1st anniversary blog hop! We are celebrating by having a Birthday theme for our challenge this week and also by giving out tons of great prizes - so make sure you play along with us this week and leave lots of comments on the DT member pages to maximize your chances of winning!

So now onto my card(s) for the week... I decided to use products from one of our wonderful sponsors, Simon Says Stamp. I started with the Simon Says Stamp Birthday Farm Animals set and did some stamping with masks and my MISTI to create the image. I coloured using Copics (still learning!) and then I decided that I wanted to make it into a one-layer inlaid die cut card. I used my Simon Says Stamp Stitched Rectangles to create a frame, and then I used an older set from Simon Says Stamp to stamp the celebrate and the star around the frame. 

When I started the first card, I decided to stamp everything twice since I was convinced that I would mess up at some point and I did not want to start over. I was very surprised when I finished that I hadn't messed up! I had two almost identical card fronts but I wanted to make two very different cards so decided to turn the second card front into a shaker card. I masked the animals and used the Simon Says Stamp Stars and Dots stencil to creeate the background with some silver Viva Ferro. I then used the same stitched rectangle dies to crate the frame. I used clear sequins (and a few blue stars) because I didn't want to distract from the image. I really like how both cards turned out :)

For the final card, I decided to incorporate the new Baby Party Animals stamps with the Birthday Farm Animals for a twist. The Baby Party Animals are part of the fabulous new release from Simon Says Stamp - there is a lot of great products in this release that have made their way onto my "most wanted" list. For this card, I used the baby pigs, the banner and the balloon. One thing that I would like to point out is that the different baby animals have the same body shape so if you don't like the arm orientation on the animal you want to stamp, you can "borrow" the arms from another animal. On my card, I wanted the baby pigs to each be holding up their "outside" arms - so the piglet on the left was stamped true but the piglet on the right was masked and stamped with baby rabbit arms (again made easier with the MISTI!).

I coloured the image and die cut using the Simon Says Stamp Postage die. The background was created using the Birthday greeting from the Baby Farm Animals set - stamped repeatedly tone on tone.

So that's it for my Birthday cards! Now it's onto the next stop on the hop - the amazing Jenny Colacicco or if you want to go back to the beginning - link here to AAA Cards!

So join in the fun with us as we celebrate 1!!!!

Thanks for visiting!
Jill