Hello everyone! My name is Ashlea and I am so excited to be on the Birch Press Designs blog for the first time. I have always loved the Birch Press Designs style and quality of product, and I am thrilled to be a part of this team to help inspire and spark ideas! For my first post, I thought I’d focus on a simple but effective technique using shadow dies. Since Birch Press has many word and shadow dies, I wanted to provide ideas of different ways to use them as often as possible! I love the pad to paper technique of rubbing an ink pad onto a piece of card stock in order to transfer a very rich and vibrant color that you just can’t get from the traditional ink blenders. Here’s a video showing a detailed tutorial of how I achieved this look.

I love this technique as it allows me to stretch my uses for these word and shadow dies. It’s super simple!

First, you’ll want to pick 3-4 colors of ink pads that won’t turn “muddy” when the colors meet. Basically, you’ll want to choose colors close to each other on the color wheel. I used Catherine Pooler inks for my pad to paper technique here because I love her pads, especially for pad to paper techniques.

Once I blended all of my colors and cut the shadow die out using the ink blended spaces, I adhered all of the letters to the shadow dies and adhered them to a card front cut with Memory Box Wrapped Stitched Rectangles dies to add a little interest to the border.

Finally, I adhered all of the word dies to the card front with foam tape to add dimension and heat embossed the sentiment “You’re In My Heart” from the Lingo Love stamp set and adhered that over the second word die down.

I hope that you’ve enjoyed learning a bit about how I created this card using the ink pad to paper technique. I hope you’ll try it out on your cards and enjoy it as much as I do! Thanks so much for stopping by and I’ll see you again soon!

Supplies

57219 Simple Love

30094 Wrapped Stitch Rectangles

CL8143 Lingo Thanks