I’m learning that I love die-cut sentiments, and one of my favorite things to do lately is to create inlays with them or to stack them up on top of each other to create lots of dimension.

Both of these cards use the Hand Lettered Hello die and the Hand Lettered Hello stamp set from Wplus9, and both use watercolor. For the “Hello Gorgeous” card, I masked off a strip on the lower half of the card, and painted a wash over the exposed strip using a combination of pink and orange watercolors. Once the panel was dry, I die-cut the hello from the strip, and stacked it on top of several other “hello’s” cut from white card stock, then mounted it back on the panel where I had cut it out from originally. To finish, I stamped the “gorgeous” sentiment in black ink under the watercolor strip, and mounted everything onto an off-white card base.

For the “Hello Sweet Friend” card, I started by creating a blue and green wash on a piece of watercolor paper, die cut the hello sentiment and set it aside. I then took a panel and positioned the hello die exactly where I wanted it to be on the finished card, and ran it through my die cutting machine. With a little glue, I inlaid the water colored sentiment into the spaces where I had cut the hello from on the plain white panel. I then stamped the “sweet friend” sentiment below, and mounted everything onto an off-white card base.

**When creating cards using this inlay technique, it’s important to keep the inside areas of the letters on hand, too! When I die cut the hello into my white panel for the card above, I made sure to keep the insides of the H, E, L’s and O so that once I inlaid the watercolor piece, I could put the white insides of the letters back where they belonged.