One man’s Tree Rings are another man’s Polymer Clay. Maybe I should explain? Stampin’ Up came out with a visually unique background stamp named Tree Rings, and, yes, it looks like that. But, when I first saw it, I thought of polymer clay. When my daughter was in  a high school art class, she came home with the most beautiful projects made with this colorful clay. Here’s an example of what I found on the web:

So, I set out to turn the tree rings into polymer clay, stamping with Basic Black ink on Whisper White cardstock. Always needing masculine birthday cards, I chose the colors of Dapper Denim, Tranquil Tide, Marina Mist, Emerald Envy, and Lemon Lime Twist. I used three stamps from the Swirly Bird stamp set for inking the colors on the circular shapes. And, I used one of the dies from Swirly Scribbles for cutting two shapes from the colors of cardstock. Can you see the two shapes made with the one die? I glued those shapes to the art piece, and snipped off the overlapping edges.

I had planned to use our Happy Birthday die for the sentiment, but it needed to stand out among all this pattern. It would be Basic Black, but even our tiny dimensionals would show. My solution was to layer it twice; once for shadowing and another layer for lifting.

The last decision was the card base color. I chose Island Indigo, because it blended well with the other colors, and seemed to look better than duplicating a color. It’s been fun, Polymer Clay! Who knows what you’ll be the next time we meet!