My cards are usually simple because I like the clean look, rather than lots of embellishments and layers and clutter. I like to have open space. But they aren’t usually one layer cards – they are almost harder to do since you want enough interest in the card but you’re not using any layers to help. This one uses two sets from the Annual catalogue – the Stampin’ Up! Bordering Blooms and Yippee Skippee sets. The catalogue has a number of stamps with borders – which are easy to skip over – because they discontinued the wheel stamps. People would have issues getting the wheels to move in a straight line; I only tried a few times but I’m much happier now that I’ve “de-wheeled” my wheel stamps and made them into ordinary clear stamps. This card uses the final stamp from the Bordering Blooms set that I referred to recently that hadn’t previously been inked. Since I know that the border sets are easy to skip over, I wanted to highlight one on a card.

The base is blackberry bliss, one of the 2014-2016 in colours and one of my favourites. I love the richness of the colour. I used the embossing buddy before embossing the border in gold. This is actually the third attempt – the first two didn’t have the border in the right place so I have some embossed borders to use up on another card or two! I then embossed the sentiment from Yippee Skippee also in gold. I dry embossed the envelope flap with the large polka dot embossing folder, although you can’t see that in the picture. I struggle to photograph the metallics – somehow the top of the card is more blurry than the rest. I’m not sure quite how that happened. But, as the sentiment says, life doesn’t have to be perfect to be wonderful!