Hi, crafty friends. Today I have a fun birthday card to share, featuring the candles from the Designer Birthday Cake digi stamp set from Streamside Studios. I’ve made a card previously with these candles, you can find it here.

The stamp actually comes with all the candles in a row, but for this design I wanted to shake things up a bit. I colored my candles in a bit of a rainbow order and used a lot of candles (I printed the whole row of candles three times). After they were all colored came the fun part: fussy cutting.

I don’t normally mind fussy cutting, I find it relaxing, but these candles are tiny and there are plenty of them, so it took a while. Well worth it, though. I prefer cutting right against the black lines of the image when I fussy cut, and that’s what I did here, for everything but the wick of the candle, which has a bit of white showing on either side.

Using clear foam tape, I mounted each of the candles onto a panel I created from Soft Stone cardstock from Papertrey Ink. I then mounted that panel onto my card base, which I created from Stamper’s Select White cardstock, also from PTI. I love the cardstock from Papertrey Ink, it’s my favorite!

Using the Happy Birthday die from My Favorite Things, I die cut the words three times from True Black cardstock from Papertrey Ink and the shadow twice from 40 lb vellum from Bazzill. I stacked the black cardstock and covered my layered die cut with VersaMark ink, then sprinkling on Super fine detail black embossing powder from Ranger and heat set. I don’t usually use black embossing powder, it tends to create a mess, but to create shiny die cuts like this, it works great. I repeated the embossing process a couple more times to make it extra shiny and glossy and even.

Before die cutting the vellum, I put a piece of adhesive sheet on the back of one, so I’d be able to glue them together without any adhesive showing. The trick with adhesive and vellum is to have an even layer on the back, whether it’s liquid glue or another type of adhesive. Of course you can add your adhesive in strategic places behind the vellum or put embellishments on top, but I didn’t want to have to think about that for this card, and doubling up the vellum makes it a little less transparent and it stands out more against the colorful candles behind it. I actually didn’t put any embellishments on this, I thought there was enough going on with all the candles and dimension already there.

Lots of colors for this. Three colors in most of the combos, some use four. Yes, I go overboard, I’m aware 😉