A Big Jar of Love for my Mum

Back in November, my Mum reached a milestone birthday which warranted an extra special card.  For some time, I’ve been meaning to try out an easel card and also to create a floral wreath using the Jar of Love so I decided to combine the two.

For this project, I used:

Stampin’ Up! Jar of Love stamp set

SU! Everyday Jars framelits

SU! Large Letters Framelits & Letters For You stamps

SU! Number of Years and Large Numbers framelits (sadly retired)

11½” x 5¾” Blackberry Bliss card scored at 5¾” and again at 2⅞” on one half

5¾” x 5¾” Blackberry Bliss card

5¼” x 5¼” Whisper White card

5½” x 5½” and 5” x 2” pieces of Always Artichoke (retired but I love it!)

A couple of pieces of Smoky Slate card

Silver embossing powder

SU! Inks in Blackberry Bliss, Blushing Bride, Old Olive, Garden Green

A 5½” x 2⅝” strip of DSP (I used one of the Frosted Florals pack)

A scrap of silver glimmer paper

Layered Leaves Embossing folder

I started off by stamping ‘MUM’ in Blackberry Bliss ink and cutting the letters out with the matching framelits.  For the backgrounds to the letters and numbers, I cut out a couple of scalloped ovals from Smoky Slate card and ran them through the Bigshot in the Layered Leaves embossing folder to give some texture.

Next, I set to work stamping the flowers, leaves and bow for the wreath.  I used Blackberry Bliss and Blushing Bride for the flowers using 2^nd generation stamping to get some colour variation.  The leaves were stamped in Old Olive and Garden Green.  All these were cut out using the Everyday Jars framelits.  I also cut out some small hearts from silver glimmer paper.

I drew around the scalloped oval onto the white card to give me a guide for stamping the sprigs of small leaves for the background layer of foliage. I stamped these using Old Olive and Garden Green inks in a random pattern around the oval.

The MUM letters were stuck onto the grey oval using dimensionals and then the oval was adhered to the white piece over the stamped leaf sprigs.  I played around with the flowers, leaves and hearts to get the placement right and then glued them on with a mix of glue and dimensionals, tucking some under the oval and some under the letters to add interest.  The white card was then adhered to the Always Artichoke panel and then onto the Blackberry Bliss panel.  This forms the card front.

To make the front of the card, apply strong adhesive tape to the outer half of the scored panel only.

Then stick the card front onto this adhesive.

To make the ‘stop’ for the easel, I layered up the strip of always artichoke with the DSP and the grey oval, added a stamped and heat embossed “Happy TH Birthday” strip and then stuck the numbers cut from silver glimmer paper on top using dimensionals and then stuck the whole panel on using dimensionals to raise it up to form the stopping element.

I really like the sentiment in the number set so on the strip of Always Artichoke, I stamped that and ‘70’ in Versamark and silver embossing powder and heat set it.  I stuck this onto the reverse side of the easel.

I found some great little stickers on Pinterest to stick to the back of the card to show how to display an easel card - handy for the uninitiated!

Easel card display stickers

I was really happy with the finished card but more importantly, my Mum loved it.