Hey there, crafty friends! I hope you had a wonderful weekend! Apparently, we forgot to give Mother Nature the message that today is officially the first day of spring. Even though it’s still a little chilly for any buds to bloom here in the Midwest, I thought we could still celebrate the turn of the season with beautiful spring florals and pastel colors! The Creative Team has been busy getting back to the basics, that is, our Boxed In Basics collection. Originally released and designed to work with sentiments in our Bubble Greetings stamp sets, we wanted to share some ‘out of the box’ ways to use Boxed In Basics!

If you haven’t been introduced to Boxed In Basics, let me introduce you! The Basics are a collection of adorable doodled borders pre-printed onto Sugar Cube cardstock and sized to fit perfectly onto an A2 card. I love having a variety of borders to choose from at a fraction of the cost of investing in the same designs in stamp form!

First up for today’s inspiration, Jean Manis grabbed the cute twirly swirly border, centered the sentiment from Plot Twist, and surrounded it with a beautiful floral arrangement using Bloomers & Bloomers Greenery. I love the touch of ink that she applied directly to the panel with Stencil Brushes. It’s the perfect way to draw attention to the sentiment!

Next up, Kim Singdahlsen got creative by cutting one of the panels in half and using it to hold her sentiment over the top of the Diagonal Stripes background. She combined two sentiments from In & Out Get Well and joined them with the ampersand from our Initially & die set. The beautifully colored stripes in the background were created by cutting the design from Sugar Cube cardstock and using a variety of inks to brush color onto each diagonal stripe before piecing the design back together.

Thanks so much for stopping by today! Stay tuned tomorrow as I’ll have a video to share some of my own experiments with the Boxed In Basics panels!