I’m continuing my series of cards for the first day of the month using the Stampin’ Up! Perpetual Birthday calendar stamp set. So far they’ve also used the Hello You thinlits dies as well. Since I’m about 75% Welsh, March 1st is a special day being St. David’s Day. St. David of course being the patron saint of Wales. I took my colour inspiration from the Welsh flag. Here’s an image of it from wikipedia’s page on Wales.

So this is whisper white, real red and garden green. I cut out the hello from real red using the Hello You thinlits dies and then stamped the month from the Perpetual Birthday calendar in green. I also used the March image and the two colours for decoration.

Do you see that the hello looks rather three dimensional? I got the idea from Mary Fish’s site, Stampin’ Pretty last year where she had a layered Joy. I cut out four garden green hellos and carefully glued them together using the tombow glue. I put a splodge of glue onto a card scrap so that I can carefully control how much I’m transferring to the die cut word I find that if I’m actually having to squeeze the bottle there’s a chance that there will be too much glue. Also it helps to let the glue sit for a few minutes so that it’s a bit more set and less likely to leak out. Here’s a view from the side:

I really like the two tone affect. After re-checking Mary’s site, I found that she’d used transfer adhesive sheets which would have been MUCH easier. Next time! I glued the whisper white onto a real red base. I also lined the outside of the envelope flap with the backgrounds DSP in real red.

I’m a bit late posting today; I got back yesterday from three weeks of Spanish school in Barcelona and although I managed to schedule all the posts for whilst I was away, I didn’t have time to get a few extras done to allow for jet lag!

I was happy with the Hello January card from last month so I decided to continue the theme. This card uses the Stampin’ Up! Hello You thinlits dies and the Perpetual Birthday calendar stamp set. The base is real red and the very vanilla piece is 3/4 inch smaller in both dimensions. I had intended on adding another layer of blushing bride but it just seemed too much after the stamping. I used the heart stamp from the Perpetual birthday calendar and stamped in real red and blushing bride. The February also comes from the Perpetual birthday calendar stamp set. The happy is of course cut out from real red using the Hello You thinlits dies. I have had a lot of success by running the die through the big shot half a dozen times before trying to coax the card off the die. I was also going to add some of the heart stickers from the perpetual birthday calendar kit but that seemed to be overkill.

If you ever get the opportunity to go to another country to learn another language do it! It was an amazing experience. It was pretty scary the first day, being in a country where I could basically just ask for water, wine or the check but really, what more do you need?! It was incredible how quickly I learned to understand and speak more. The people in Barcelona are extremely nice and friendly and generous. They all seemed so delighted that I was making the effort to speak in Spanish, that they would patiently wait as I stumbled through my phrases. I’ve made a number of new friends and if I could, I’d go back tomorrow!