Have a fantastic celebration {Lili of the Valley}

Hi, crafty friends! I’m sharing a very typical Elin card today. It’s what I like to call clean and simple cluster. I love creating clusters of die cut scraps of patterned paper for my cards, but I haven’t done it in a while, and thought this card was the perfect opportunity for some paper play.

I colored up Teddy with pile of presents from Lili of the Valley, sticking to a combination of mostly blue, teal and green (with a little bit of yellow). I’m a big fan of analogous color palettes, and the images from Lili of the Valley are perfect for it. There’s usually a lot of patterns in their images, and by sticking with analogous color combinations, the end result isn’t too busy. You may notice that each of the presents here only has one actual color, but I’ve gone a shade darker for the patterns (the base color in the top two presents). If I’d mixed and matched, this would look like a hot mess, but by sticking to one color, it’s more pleasing to the eye.

These clusters are pretty easy to put together. On my desk I keep a bin with die cut scraps of patterned paper. I organize these scraps by color, and put each color in a stamp storage bag. Whenever I want to create a cluster, I choose the colors that go with my card, dump the contents of the storage pockets on my desk and play. This time I used three bags; the blue, the green and the gray – it’s nice to throw a neutral into the mix. The scraps I used for this card are from a few different companies. The blue ones are from Papirdesign (the grey with the blue stars is the back of that blue with the lighter dots), the green ones are from 3ndypapir and Karen Foster, with a little bit of New Leaf cardstock from Papertrey Ink thrown in for a darker green to make the dark blue a little less dominant. The top grey one is actually from Magnolia, whereas the one with the sentiment is from DCWV. The sentiment itself is from Norsk Stempelblad, stamped in Cornflower ink from My Favorite Things. To finish off the card I added a few green enamel dots from Papirdesign.