Hi, crafty friends! I have another card to share featuring stamps from the newly released A Special Day collection illustrated by Stacey Yacula for Purple Onion Designs.

This time I’m keeping the focus on Cecil, a cute tortoise with a party balloon in his hand an a party hat on his head. I stamped him in Extreme Black ink from My Favorite Things, created a mask for him and stamped the older The Perfect Spot background stamp using Fadeout ink from Inkon3. I also stamped a tree stump from the Woodland Floor Set, which is also another new one with the A Special Day release.

I used a lot of green for this card. Not too many markers, but I feel like most of the card is green. I actually had to refill all the greens I used for the fields and trees halfway through. They hadn’t been refilled in a couple of years, so it was about time, I use these greens a lot.

I needed a pop of color to counteract all the green and decided on a corally pink color combination that I used for the party hat and balloon. I dug through my colored cardstock looking for a match, and wound up with Fire Coral cardstock from My Favorite Things. I created a top fold A2 card base from it and adhered my colored panel onto it to the left side, it wasn’t wide enough to cover the entire card front.

In the fall of 2020 I was running seriously low on X-Press It blending card, which is the only cardstock I use for my Copic coloring. It was hard to get hold of back then, but I lucked out and got a pack from Amazon UK. It was A4, which kind of blew my mind a little bit. Up until that point, I didn’t even know A4 X-Press It existed, I’ve always bought letter size. A4 is less wide and taller than letter size, which means I only get two panels that cover an A2 card front from one sheet. I used one of the narrower pieces on this card, which left me with about 1/4″ extra width on the card base. I debated cutting it off, but I feel like the pink strip on the right provides a little bit of balance, the card would be very green without it.

Onto a separate piece of Fire Coral cardstock, I stamped and white heat embossed a sentiment from the Til mannen stamp set from Norsk Stempelblad AS, before die cutting it using a speech bubble die from Altenew. I popped it up on 1/16″ foam squares from Gina K for a tiny bit of dimension.

You’d think that with a close to full panel of coloring that I’d use a lot more colors than this, but the four greens near the left end of this graphic were all I used for the grass and the trees, which covers most of the card.