July has been a busy, busy month!  With the 4^th of July, and our many birthdays, this month has been busy…and it is only half over!  Oh, and squeeze in a high school class reunion!  I have made several cards, but just haven’t had the time to update my blog.  I used a couple of tips I found on some fellow cardmaker’s blogs.  Thank you Jennifer McGuire and Kristina Werner! 

Here is what I came up with…

I used the Balloons stencil from Simon Says Stamp and my distress inks to make the balloons.  I then used the wiggly lines from the Hand Written Borders stamp set to make the strings.  I thought they came out cute!.  I had a cup cake stamp from Verve and wanted to try another technique that I had seen some time ago to make this a “scratch and sniff” card.  Chocolate of course!  LOL!  I mixed some instant pudding mix with some clear embossing powder and embossed the “icing” of the cupcake.  I had stamped it first with some dark brown ink as I found when I just embossed the mixture, the icing was too light.  I used my Wink of Stella clear pen to put some sparkle on the flowers and then added some Glossy Accents.

Another look…

I had seen Jennifer McGuire create her own glitter paper on a card she made, so I decided to make some paper to die cut the “happy birthday” out from.  I was very happy with the result!  I know I will be doing this again! 

I printed my sentiment from the computer and then used a balloon die from Simon Says Stamp to cut out the sentiment.  I used some distress ink to ink up the edges. 

A peek inside…

This was a fun, simple, and easy card to make in a hurry.  I’m sure I will be using these techniques again!

And one final look…

Nancee  J