did i really just make this up?

woohoo, it's tuesday and time for a brand new challenge at shopping our stash, this week we give you, "what's the good word" for which we'd like to see word dies in use on your projects! i'm kind of proud of my card, and i think i might've invented a technique, but first here's my card and then i'll tell you about it:

happy birthday border die: lawn fawn; yellow paper: sei; cloud paper: from an echo park page kit packaging; polaroid: dear lizzy/american crafts; text paper: prima; sunshine banner and scalloped border: echo park; cloud punches: fiskars; daisy: martha stewart; kromekote cardstock: the paper cut; adhesives: elmer's brand gluetape; scotch gluestick; 3m foam tape

ok, so, do you see the background paper with all the white script against the yellow background? well, those are all cuts using lawn fawn's "happy birthday border" die over and over (and over... and over...) on scraps of glossy kromekote cardstock, which i lined up neatly on the yellow paper and affixed with gluestick. when i asked my craftbestie stephanie if she'd ever seen anyone else do this she said NO... the reason being that no one else was crazy enough to fuss with this many tiny bits of script! :) but really, it wasn't as fiddly as i thought it might be. the fact that the border phrase is nearly 6" long means that each cut covers quiiiiiiiite a bit of real estate. and whereas some people might feel compelled to measure and mark and things, i settled for just eyeballing the spaces between the phrases vertically; as well as the distance between the tops of the t's and the bottoms of the y's for height. it definitely definitely helps to glue on ALL the complete phrases first and get the spacing fixed nicely before going back to add the partial cuts that make up the edges. when i had the whole background filled in, i trimmed the edges, mounted the panel to my folded card and used it just like any other patterned paper!

this is one of those cards that totally reinforces my tendency to save ALL the scraps and leftovers from every project. and to tell the truth, i'm never quite sure if i should be proud of that or not. but in this case, every element except the background was from the scrap bag: one daisy saved from a pack of stickers, two texty clouds punched for another project, the small scale square of cloud paper from the front of a page kit, the "sunshine" pennant snipped from a sheet of greetings, etc, etc; even the scooter polaroid had been pre-trimmed from a full sheet of paper and then not used at the time. so while the creation of the background admittedly took longer than usual, the collage of elements came together really quickly, which sort of balances it out.

looking for more ideas on using diecut words? the SOS design team has lots... check them out! ♥