Hello Honey Bee friends! Today I’m sharing a card to add to my birthday card stash that I’ve made with more of my favorite previously released products! I’ve used the beautiful Lovely Layers: Tulips along with a few other favorite sets. If you would like to learn a coupe of tips for quick ink blending for your die cuts, read on!

My tip for faster ink blending for your die cuts is instead of inking each individual die cut, take a strip of cardstock and do your ink blending on that! I used a coral ink and a yellow ink and two blender brushes. To get the gradient, I overlapped the two colors in the middle of my 80# white cardstock strip, like this:

Then I just lined up the dies from the Lovely Layers: Tulips and cut them out with my die cutting machine. Easy and fast! If you want a bit more depth, like I did, it was easy to ink on more coral ink along the bottom of the die cuts!

Another quick way to color your die cuts is to begin with colored cardstock! I die cut the Lovely Layers: Tulips leaves and stems and the Lovely Layers: Spring Greenery (I used just one of the dies from this set) from green cardstock. I blended on a darker shade of green ink to quickly add ink to the pieces for more depth.

I used glue to adhere the layers together. Next I adhered a blue cardstock panel to my A2 card base. Then I added the flowers and leaves to my card base with glue and foam dots.

I die cut the bee in the Lovely Layers: Bugs Honey Cuts from 80# white cardstock and the bee’s wings from vellum. I used my Copic markers to easily color the two layers of the bee’s body. To get the “fuzzy” look on the bee, I used a fine tipped black pen and added tiny lines along the black stripes.

I glued the bee layers together and adhered it to the card with foam squares. The sentiment is from the Inside: Birthday Sentiments stamp set and stamped in black pigment ink. I cut it out with the coordinating die and added foam strips to adhere it to the card.

For a bit of embellishment, I dug DEEP into my stash of older products and pulled out my Prills. Who remembers these?! I added dots of glue to the Tulip center and adhered the Prills.

I really do enjoy pulling out some of my older and favorite products and hope I’ve inspired you to do the same! Thank you so much for stopping by today!