Up, Up and Away Birthday

I love the look of negative space left from die cuts and used to make a background. This technique is used
very successfully by Maile Bailes, among others. Here's a take on the technique.




As I shared a couple of days ago, I recently purchased these cloud dies from Papertrey and have been anxious to use them. I also discovered I had a balloon punch hidden in the back of my punch drawer (note to self--go through that drawer again and see what else I have that I've forgotten about!).  Anyway I thought the clouds and the balloons should make a good team for a birthday card for a young boy.  So, starting with a light blue card base, I cut a slightly smaller white piece, and embossed it with the circles impression plate (from, guess who?, Papertrey).  Then I placed the dies (there are two) where I wanted them, letting one fall off the edge a bit, and ran them through my Big Shot.  Since things generally look better when used in odd numbers, I put the smaller cloud die back on the card stock and ran it through one more time.

For the balloons, I punched four balloons from patterned paper (three for the front and one for the inside). Because I wanted to pop the white background up from the card base, I thought the patterned paper alone might be a bit wimpy, so I punched a scrap piece of card stock six more times. To assemble, I adhered a patterned balloon to a plain balloon, then adhered that to yet another plain balloon--then repeated the whole process for the remaining balloons.  The addition of those plain card stock balloons lent just the right amount of support to keep the balloons from getting crushed when mailing.  To mimic the look of a shiny balloon surface, I simply coated each of the finished balloons with Glossy Accents and let dry.

In the meantime, I stamped the birthday sentiment in Chocolate (PTI), and adhered it to the card front with Pop Dots. I then lined the inside of the card with white stock, and adhered the fourth balloon inside along with a brown/white twine tail.  The tail was held in place by judiciously placed Quickie glue pen. I like using my Quickie pen for placing twine because it has a fine ballpoint tip that can be used to draw a line (or in this case a "flight trail") without getting extra glue all over the place. (Hey, I have messy glue issues, what can I say.)

Anyway, when the first balloons were dry, I adhered the brown/white twine to them, then adhered them to the card front using just a bit of Score-Tape.  Again, I drew a flight trail for the balloon strings to follow with the Quickie pen, and there you have it. A cute little card for some cute little boy!

So, do you like the look of the negative die cuts too?  I'd love to see what you've done, so leave a comment and a link so I can check it out!  In the meantime, have a happy-balloon-kind-of-day!