The Fab Friday challenge this week is to use some or all of the five retiring colours. This is indeed a challenge because although strawberry slush is one of my favourite colours, the others leave me a little cold – especially pistachio pudding and crisp cantaloupe. I decided that to make this a true challenge for myself, I should use at least three colours.

Here’s the challenge banner:

I cut out ovals from the very vanilla card using the smallest oval framelits (and serious ruler and pencil work). I felt like doing some watercolouring and so did a light wash of the three colours that I chose – coastal cabana, baked brown sugar and strawberry slush getting lighter towards the bottom onto a piece of watercolour paper. Once it dried, I glued the watercolour paper to the back of the very vanilla piece. I then stamped the birthday cake from Endless Birthday Wishes in each ink. This was when I realised my error. The watercolour paper wasn’t glued straight and there was a definite line where the thicker watercolour paper finished. It was my Stampin’ Trimmer to the rescue – I trimmed the card down so that the watercolour paper went all the way to the edges. I then made a card base from very vanilla just a quarter inch larger. The watercoloured piece was popped up on a lot of dimensionals so that it is secure as well as not droopy.

This meant making an odd sized envelope for my 5″ by 3.25″ card which fortunately needs a 7.5″ square piece of card stock. Since I had the stamp inky, I added the birthday cake image to the front of the envelope.