Here’s another birthday card and it’s showcasing a new paper, the Botanical Gardens DSP which you can order starting tomorrow. The birds of paradise on this paper are so striking that, once again, I don’t want to cover them up too much.

It’s a very straight forward card, once you have your DSP. I cut the paper to 4″ by 5 1/4″ so you could make 6 cards from one piece of DSP – as long as you don’t use as much as I did decorating the envelope. But running out of DSP is not something that’s ever happened to me – or ever likely to so I don’t worry about using DSP to decorate the envelopes.

The colours on this piece of paper are basic black, mint macaron, old olive and cajun craze – I chose the last two for the mat and card although I wavered over which to make the mat and which the card. In the end though, an old olive mat mimicked the vertical stripes too much. The sentiment is from my current favourite set for birthday sentiments, Birthday Blossoms and stamped in the basic black archival ink. The placement of the sentiment and its mat took a little thought. Luckily I hadn’t glued it together when my brother commented that I really shouldn’t hide one of the flowers (the one to the left of the sentiment was half covered) so I was able to trim the two cardstocks a little. Having the sentiment “fall” off the right hand side of the DSP somehow balanced everything nicely and meant that the old olive vertical stripe was lined up with the left hand edge of the old olive sentiment layer.

I made this card whilst deliberating over my first card for the design team over at CAS Colours & Sketches which will debut on Thursday. It’s a colour challenge and I am finding it a challenge. So far I’ve made two cards inspired by the colours although they did not both end up following the rules. So I’ll be sharing those later in the week.