Playing with Paper - Coloring with Stampin' Blends

Today I needed a quick card for a birthday that I didn't know was coming.  

I wanted to do something different, so I chose papers from Botanical Textures DSP (discontinued) - a black and white design, and added color using a Soft Sea Foam Stampin' Blends marker.  

Next, I chose Soft Sea Foam cardstock for the card base and Basic Black and Basic White cardstocks for mats & such.  Because it was a special birthday, I wanted to spell that out.  I had two die sets that I thought I could combine to create the focal message.  Both were discontinued, but there are some newer dies that would work. The first was the Wanted to Say dies - where I got a matted "Happy Birthday".  There's a lovely new set coming out the 5th or so of May that would work as a replacement - it's called Words and Wishes.  The 2nd was called Birthday Celebration - and had numbers dies.  These could be replaced by the Alphabet A La Mode dies.

Because the "Happy Birthday" was composed of the words stacked together, I had to die cut them carefully and then fussy cut to cut them apart.  (You won't need to do that with the newer dies as they're made separately.) I then also used the "Birthday" part to get the extra "th" I needed - fussy cutting them apart as well.  After cutting the "60", I glued it to black cardstock and fussy cut a mat around it, since the number dies didn't have a associated mat die.  Oh yes, you can probably see that I used Soft Sea Foam cardstock for the letters/numbers, and Basic Black for the mats.

I created these words and numbers, added them to a rectangle of white cardstock, then matted that with black before adding it to the card front using Dimensionals.

The final piece was to add some embellishments made using Extraordinary Flora Washi Tape on white cardstock cut with Extraordinary Flora dies. 

Inside: 

The sentiment inside was created with the Hybrid Embossing folder called Thoughtful Moments.  I inked the folder with Memento Tuxedo Black ink - and then colored it with the same Stampin' Blends I used to color the paper.  The rest is made using the same things I used on the card front.