Hello crafters!

It’s Kelly here. I’m so excited to share to post today! Our readers are from all over but when I see Stars and Stripes it’s all American for me 🙂 Hero Arts has such great stamps sets for this type of project. Personally, I own all of the Operation Write Home sets so I knew I wanted to use one of them but it was so hard to make a choice! I finally settled on Happy Birthday.

I just love everything about this set! There are so many ways to use these images. If you love it to you can get it here.

Before we start I’d like to add a disclaimer: There are no stickles on these cards but not because I didn’t want to add them :). I intend to send them to Operation Write Home and any kind of glitter is unsafe for our soldiers. Okay you know the drill. Three ways to use this stamp set . . .and GO!

For my first card I went pretty traditional. I laid down some red stripes directly to my card base. I used both star images from Happy Birthday to stamp on some navy dot paper. I heat embossed them in white. I popped up the navy panel with dimensional adhesive. I kept it pretty simple so it would be a uni-sex card.

I just love these little balloons don’t you? I stamped the balloons a bunch of times across the top of my card base. I masked the string part of the stamp and just drew in my own since I wanted them free and not tied together. I stamped them again on a couple of different colors of paper, fussy cut them out, and adhered them down. The same idea could be accomplished with masking but I wanted all my cards to match. I’m crazy like that 🙂

Last one and is definitely my favorite. That hot air balloon is so awesome! I see like a hundred different ways of using it!  I started with my background. Stencils are super hot right now but I didn’t have a cloud stencil. So I just made my own. I’m cool like that 😉 I stamped the cloud from the set multiple times on printer paper. I stamped it at all different angles right on top of each other until I had a very long line of clouds. I trimmed this out and coated the back with repositional adhesive. I used it as a mask and I rubbed on salty ocean distress ink until the entire panel was covered in clouds. The layout is a CASE of Jenny’s card here. i just love it! The balloon was paper pieced with the same papers as before.

That’s it for me! I hope you found something to inspire you 🙂 Don’t forget to link up your creation for the Stars and Stripes Linky Party! You could win a $25 gift card to A2Z Scrapbooking! If you need some supplies before the end of the month you can also use the code KELLYL15  to get 15% off your order 🙂

Thanks for joining me!

XoXo

Kelly