Birthday with a leaf theme

My lovely friend Caroline had a birthday last week and I bought her this gorgeous jug designed by Katrin Moye. When it came to making her card I thought it would be nice to echo the beautiful leaf design on the jug so I came up with this:

The card base was made using Sahara Sand card stock. I cut a smaller piece of Kraft card stock, sewed a border around it and inked the edges with Sahara Sand ink. The leaf, from With Gratitude, was stamped with Sage Shadow ink onto Sage Shadow card stock. When I'd cut it out I positioned it on the Kraft and drew the flower veins and stem in black. The dots were drawn with a Versamark pen and heat embossed with white embossing powder. Once everything was assembled I stamped a sentiment in Sahara Sand.

I was so pleased with how the card turned out that I was inspired to make this gift bag to hold the jug.

That beautiful, vanilla-coloured, suede-feel bag was actually a piece of thick wallpaper lining paper, scalloped on the edge with the SU scallop border punch. I set a pair of jumbo eyelets into each side using my Cropadile and threaded them with some gorgeous chocolate-coloured velvet ribbon to make handles. I'll definitely be making more of these bags so look out for a tutorial on this blog very soon.

I made this decorative panel using the leaf motif and fixed it on one side of the bag. And then, because I was on a roll...

...I rustled up this gift tag using my handy tag stamp by Inca, another of those eyelets and that leaf motif again.

So there we have it - a matching gift set!

I really enjoyed this project - I love it when things match.

Perhaps I should set up a dating agency!

See you tomorrow when I'll be in a spring mood.