Hi crafty friends! And happy birthday to me! I don’t really make a big deal about my birthday, but my birthday bothers me less now than it used to. Maybe I’m getting old enough to appreciate each day in a different way? I don’t know, but I’m not the focus today, these flowers are!

I love this Sweet Stems die set from Concord & 9th. It was part of their February release, and it’s so versatile. It has a separate coordinating stencil set (which I didn’t use for this card), which is great if you want lots of color, but not spend 512 hours on a card. The die set consists of a cover die, which is what I used here, and seven smaller dies. One of them cuts the outline for Hey Friend, which is a sentiment in the coordinating stamp set. I love when you can mix and match products like this.

I used the cover die to cut a bajillion pieces from white cardstock (Stamper’s Select White from Papertrey Ink), then cut one panel each from Peacock, Honeycomb, Nectar and Grapefruit cardstock, all Concord & 9th colors. I started with one of the white outlines adhered to a piece of Harbor cardstock (also a C9 color), and puzzle pieced the stems and leaves into it with the Peacock color.

In total, I stacked 6 white outlines and added the flowers and the flower centers at varying depths. The flowers are all slightly different shapes, but the centers are all the same, making them easy to stack.

I stamped and gold heat embossed the large sentiment from the Sweet Stems stamp set onto heavyweight translucent vellum from My Favorite Things. This vellum is very thick – it’s my favorite. It’s even solid enough to use for a card base, and as you can see, even at just one layer, it’s opaque enough that the flowers behind the sentiment don’t make it hard to read. I added liquid adhesive in strategic spots behind the embossing and adhered the sentiment to the white frame, before finishing off with a few satin gold sequins from Altenew. They match the Gilded embossing powder from Brutus Monroe perfectly.