Happy Birthday Sweet Pea Stamps!

It's Sweet Pea Stamps' 3rd birthday/anniversary.

To celebrate the occasion, the Sweet Pea Stamps blog has held a birthday card competition - to enter you had to make a birthday card for Sweet Pea Stamps, using one of their stamps.

I love love loooooove their gorgeous, fantasy-themed stamps, especially Ching Chou Kuik's designs (of which I have a, quite frankly, silly amount! :lol:) so of course I had to join in! :D

This was my birthday card:

I've been wanting to use this gorgeous Ching Chou Kuik design for a while and I wanted to make a richly-coloured, detailed, Eastern-influenced card. My starting point for this card, other than the image, was digging out my scrummy Taj Mahal paper stack and choosing the gorgeous, glittered, patterned background paper. I coloured the image to coordinate with the paper, using my Promarkers, metallic Promarkers and also some Cosmic Shimmer Acrylic Drawing Inks for added shimmer.

I matted my background paper onto sheeny, mirror-effect blue paper and attached to a plain white card blank. I cut a border from blue card using a Martha Stewart edge punch and cut flourishes from mountboard using the Tim Holtz Elegant Flourishes die. I coloured the flourishes with Inka Gold and attached to the card. I coloured plain white paper flowers with metallic gold pen and attached to the card, layering them with blue Prima flowers.

I cut the image out by hand, using a Nestie die as a template, and edged it first with Broken China Distress Ink and then with Inka Gold and attached it with foam pads.  

I made the greeting pin myself by attaching beads onto a piece of gold wire and stamping and embossing, with gold embossing powder, the greeting onto a piece of the mirror-effect blue paper, wrapping it around the pin and glueing it and trimming the edge to a pennant shape. I attached the pin using silicone glue.

To finish, and to add opulence, I added lots of decoration using my Perlen Pens in gold and pearl - adding centres to the flowers, some dots along the punched border and a dotted border around the edges of the card. I also added some teeny tiny dots to the image here and there on the jewellery.

Et voila! The lighting in the photos really doesn't do justice to the lovely shimmer and sheen of this card.

Happy birthday Sweet Pea Stamps - may you have many more successful years! :)

I've entered this card into the Sweet Pea Stamps birthday competition and am also entering it into the current challenge ("cut it out") at Passion for Promarkers.