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Polka Dot Orchard + Irish Friendship Card

3/13/2020

Happy (almost) St. Patrick's Day & it's Friday the 13th too!!! Eeek! Are you superstitious? I'm not really, but I think I have a bit of 'Luck o' the Irish' with me today. Because I'm sharing this sweet card full of spring colors, plaid, and childhood memories from this darling "Lollipop Love" set by Polka Dot Orchard digital stamps. It's not just for Valentines Day. It's versatile for other occasions too! Isn't this cheery and fun??? Love it!!!

Reminds of those brightly colored sucker pops I used to get from the candy store across the street from my Grandma's house. OH! You heard me right! A kids dream! Am I right? Oh yeah...a sweet little mom and pop general store, but we always called it the "candy store," where all our pennies were spent when we came to visit! And these suckers took me right back to those days! Such sweet memories of me and my little sister filling our small brown paper bags full of 1 cent candies. Oh! Those were the days!

Tutorial on how I made this card:
I folded an 8.5x11" Papertrey Ink shamrock green cardstock in half for my card base. It's one of my favorite brands, because it's a good, quality, sturdy 100-110lb cover cardstcok. Great for a base. Next I selected this lovely Irish looking plaid patterned paper, trimmed ¼” smaller than our base and adhered to the card base. And trimmed off the top of the cardstock. As I've been making larger cards lately. While A2 sized cards seem too small lately and an A7 card seem too big. This card is in between at about 6x5 3/4," which is just a smidge smaller than a perfect square.

My color palette was inspired by those suckers I remember from my childhood and a wee bit of Irish influence. I use WPS Free Office document program to copy and paste Polka Dot Orchard digital images, to layer, move images around, and allows you to resize them. For today's project I resized the suckers, copied, and pasted that image three times. And arranged them to form a 4-leaf clover. Once I had the images where I wanted them, I grouped them as one piece, saved, and renamed, as a “new” document in the same file as my original stamp set, for future use.

I printed my image on my HP printer using the thin brand of white cardstock from HL. And colored the image with alcohol markers. I originally had 4 sets of suckers to color, but while I was coloring my last grouping of suckers, my red marker bled really badly outside the lines and into the other suckers. It looked so ugly, I just wanted to cry. But we all make mistakes. And life goes on and then I went into recovery mode. So now I have a 3-leaf clover and still feeling pretty lucky. I’m all about problem solving and salvaging a project. Which in the end did save me a lot of time and resources, instead of just tossing it and starting over.

Using a die cutting machine I cut the image out with a stitched square die and turned for a diamond shape. And cut out our sentiment with a stitched oval die. Using a Picket Fence blending brush, added some yellow lemonade distress ink to highlight our image and sentiment. Then cut out a larger stitched oval from the same shamrock green cardstock and adhered to back of sentiment. Next adhered our image, ugly ‘mistake’ suckers pointing down (lol) to the card. Then adhered the sentiment to card, covering up the “ugly” suckers on the bottom. Voila! See...can’t even tell I messed up. Shhhhhhh...it’s our little secret. Nobody will ever know. (lol)

Added some clear glitter pen sparkle to the ‘pop’ letters on the center suckers. Added some coordinating buttons, and some festive bakers twine. And there you have a wee bit o' luck on this Irish beauty ready for it’s snail mail journey.

Here's a closer look...with a wee bit o' sparkle too!

I hope I've inspired you to try digital stamps and see what you can create. The possibilities are endless!

I used this Polka Dot Orchard Digital Stamp Set today:
Lollipop Love

Thanks for stopping by!
May the 'Luck o' the Irish' be with you
this Friday 13th and all month long.
Happy (almost) St. Patrick's Day! ~Kim

Check them out...
Shop here ==> Polka Dot Orchard digital stamps