A Gardener’s Delight

Hi Creative Friends,

Any gardeners in your house? We don’t have one exactly in our house, but the next best thing… a son-in-law that has quite the green thumb! So, in celebration of his birthday, I created a paper garden for him.

I had loads of fun adding little details to make it special. To help me out, I used Papertrey Ink’s Above the Ground stamp and die set and borrowed the door from Spooky Delights.

This card design is one that evolved as I went along.

I first began working on the raised vegetable planter. The Above Ground stamp and coordinating die set have everything you need to create a raised planter and also a sumptuous vegetable garden. I used a variety of inks for the stamping part. You can see them all listed in the supply list below. I hadn’t planned on making the raised planter dimensional, but the dies give you that option, so I went for it.

I could have stopped with the planter, but I wanted to make this card extra special, so I added a shed door. This door is pretty easy to create without a die (just a rectangle panel and a few thin strips for the edges), but to make it easy, I used the door in the Papertrey Ink Spooky Delights die set. From there, I colored the door by ink blending using a couple of distress inks, namely Barn Door and Aged Mahogany.

Then, my creative daughter had a brilliant idea to make the door open. At first glance, you think it would be complicated to make happen, but it’s as easy as pie! I just added a folded piece of cardstock the same size as the door, colored it with the same inks, and then mounted the actual door on top. A piece of corrugated cardboard was added for the roof (but only attached at the door, not the top so the door could swing open.

Next was the background and front of the card. I used Bristol paper for the background and ink-blended Tumbled Glass and Faded Jeans for the sky and Vintage Photo with dashes of Rusty Hinge and Ground Espresso for the ground. Then, the raised planter and door were mounted, and the sentiment stamped using Nocturne ink. As you can see, the card is a bit oversized, but no matter, it was for a special birthday, after all!

To add a few final touches, I dug around in my stash of stamps and dies and came across a retired gardening set by Stampin’ Up to add a few goodies like the ladder, rack, and shovel.

For an extra bit of fun, I lettered ‘Lettuce celebrate’ inside the shed door!

Well, that completes my papercrafting adventure for today. I hope you enjoyed it, and hopefully it gave you a spark of inspiration too! ♥

Goodies Used: