Welcome back to another Sparkling Saturday! Today I will be sharing another way to stretch your dies to get more use out of them (click here for another way). I made the panels for these cards a couple of months ago, but didn't get a chance to make them into cards until recently. I love using my dies to make stamps because it means I get to save money (for other stamp sets!) and get more uses out of my dies.



The crazy gorgeous die set I used to make my stamps is from Essentials by Ellen Bold Blossoms Stand-Alone designed by Julie Ebersole. I personally love roses, and these pretty shapes captured my heart. I die cut these out of some craft foam I had lying around, and then used temporary adhesive to stick these 'stamps' onto my acrylic blocks. They cut out cleanly and beautifully.


Since I was planning to watercolor these flowers, I used Versamark ink to stamp these images onto some watercolor paper and embossed it using Hero Arts white embossing powder. The embossing makes it easy to stay inside the lines when watercoloring, and holds the color in the shape better. I made a set of these cards, switching up the layout for each one. I used my Kuretake Gansai Tambi watercolors for these flowers.


To finish up these cards, I glued them onto an A4 sized pink side folding card base. For my sentiment, I cut out a piece of black card stock and embossed different greetings on them using the same white embossing powder from Hero Arts. Before using foam tape to adhere the sentiment on the card, I wrapped some silver/gold thread in a circle and stuck them behind the sentiment. A few more silver rhinestone stickers were added as the finishing touch. Hope you enjoyed and try this technique out with your dies! Happy crafting.