Best Wishes Homemade Background Card

Sorry for the lack of posts the past few weeks.  The store I work at is closing so I've been busy with other things.

I stamped the background card a while ago.  I saw a background I loved that looked similar and wanted to get it, then realized that since my cards are a little smaller than the stamp, the corners would either get cut off or look odd.  So I tried making my own background.  It's not perfect, but I like how it came out.
I'm using wax paper to hold the masks so I can reuse them in the future, if I want to try this again.

I started by laying the center shape die on two pieces of end to end glued sticky notes (for my mask).  I wanted to add the die cut later, and still have a border, so I traced the edge of the die (which is rounded).  I laid that in the center of the card so the trellis stamp wouldn't affect that area.  I then stamped and masked the 4 corners.  I used a trellis background stamp to fill in the background.  With the trellis shape just stopping around where the mask was it looked a bit odd, so I laid down the die and traced the edge with a black marker for a solid frame.

I was hoping to blend some colour into the shapes, but didn't think to test how it looked first.  My original idea was to use water based markers (as I don't have any bright coloured Copics) and then a water brush to spread the colour.  Luckily I tested that on scrap paper because it didn't work.  I then filled the areas around the darker marker with a lighter one.  I'm not thrilled with it, but it's not as bad as it could have been.

I die cut the center shape and inked it, then stamped the sentiment.  I die cut a TON of hydrangea blossoms, using a tool to round them a bit before gluing them onto the label.  I attached the label with pop-dots and finished the card with a die cut butterfly, inked a bit around the edges and gussied up with some glitter glue.  I didn't like the line the markers made around the edge of the corners, so I added som blossoms along those too.