Birthday Card with a Flower-Filled Vintage Creel

Today I'm sharing a sweet birthday card where I've filled Honey Bee Stamps' Vintage Creel from the Adventure Awaits release with flowers and greenery! All of my card elements were colored via the "ink smooshing" technique? I really enjoy this technique! Keep reading to learn how I used a new type of ink to emphasize the embossed lines of Vintage Creel!

All of the elements for the Vintage Creel and the Lovely Layers: Spring Greenery were inked with Distress Inks onto Distress Watercolor Cardstock. Are you familiar with what I call "ink smooshing"? If not, the way I do this technique is to take my ink pad and "smoosh" it onto my glass craft mat. I use a water sprayer to mist water onto the inks. You just want a few sprays of water so the ink is not too diluted. Then take your piece of watercolor cardstock and dip into the ink. Pick it up and use your heat tool to completely dry the piece. Next, repeat the dip and dry steps as often as desired. Add more ink to your crafting surface as needed.

These are the Distress Inks I used for the creel and flowers:

• Creel basket: Speckled Egg, Salvaged Patina, Antique Linen (white splatters are acrylic paint)
• Creel trim: Gathered Twigs, Antique Linen
• Greenery: lighter greens: Mowed Lawn, Twisted Citron; darker greens: Mowed Lawn Rustic Wilderness
• Flowers: Milled Lavender, Seedless Preserves

Here's a closeup photo of the Spring Greenery pieces after I glued the layers together.

Before I assembled the Vintage Creel, I noticed that the embossed lines that the die adds were not really visible.  I suppose this was because of the various layers of ink on the cardstock.  I had an idea pop into my head and was asking myself "Will this work?"  So I tried it, and it worked!!

THE PROCESS:  Use the new ink formulated for the new Spellbinders BetterPress and tap it onto the Vintage Creel die in the same way the directions say for the BetterPress Plates.  I carefully placed the die cut piece back into the die, added removable tape, and ran it through my Platinum die cutting machine again.  I used the same sandwich as I would for die cutting.  AND, viola!  The Tawny Brown ink I used shows up subtly in the embossed lines of the Vintage Creel!!

I used dots of Bee Creative glue to tuck the Spring Greenery pieces into the Vintage Creel. Trim off the stems to shorten them as needed. I used very little glue as I wanted to have the dimension of the pieces naturally floating above the card.

For the card base I ran a piece of 80# Neenah through my die cutting machine with the Woodgrain 3D embossing folder. I glued the embossed piece to an A2 card base. Next I added glue to the back of the Vintage Creel and to a few of the flowers and adhered it to the card.

I stamped the sentiment from the Be Still stamp set in brown ink and cut it out with the coordinating die. I added a narrow strip of foam tape to the back to pop it up on the card.

If you need to add birthday cards to your stash, this is a fun one to make and did not take me very long either! Thanks so much for stopping by today! I hope the rest of your week is good and filled with lots of crafting!

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