Gold and Cream Anniversary Card

Good evening, this week has been very busy hence the late post but we are going on holiday to Christchurch on Friday so I will have to have a go at scheduling a post for next week, so you may well see nothing!

This week’s card was for my mum to send to some good friends of hers for their Anniversary, and although I like some of the individual elements, I just wasn't happy with it when I had finished.  It felt like the colours were a bit muddy and it didn't quite come off as I wanted, anyway here it is …

The card is A5 and I wanted some gold patterned paper for the background, of course in my room full of stuff I had nothing that was quite right!  Rather than buying some more I found a 12x12 sheet of paper from the set I got in a pack from Costco years ago that was cream a with beige vine pattern on it and went over the vines with a quickie glue pen and covered it in gold glitter, this background paper ended up being my favourite part of the card.

I made one large flower from the Heartfelt Creations Vintage Florets and three buds from the smallest dies in the same set.  As I did before with the Heartfelt Birthday Card (link to card) I made up a mixture of iridescent medium, gold glitter and some yellow ink and painted it on the stamped images before I die cut the petals.  Learning from last time I didn't bother to emboss the petals after cutting them as I was going to shape them afterwards.  I also used up some of the leaves (near the big flower) I did for the Heartfelt card which are actually from the Delicate Aster but did some new small leaves for the buds.  I do still love my hot glue gun … gives you some wiggle time whilst only having to wait a minute for it to be completely solid.  I never have to bother about making a box when the flowers are made with the glue gun as they are like rocks!

For the focal point of the card I used Elegant Ovals with gold card and cream centura pearl card.  The gold card could either be the foundations card or some card I found from Anna Marie Designs that looks exactly the same to me, so I can’t tell you which one I used!  The Britannia dies came out for the sentiment and when I went to stick it all together I thought that the large oval looked a bit bare so I found a feather in the Creative Expressions Vintage Lingerie stamp set and heat embossed it in gold to fill the space.  The embossing looked a bit lumpy to me, but that was all I had!

I matted the whole thing on some gold card and added a few gems and it was finished.  As I just wasn't quite happy with it, I wanted to keep adding stuff, so had to just step away.

Lessons learned from this card were; 1) don’t put too many layers on flowers, it doesn't necessarily improve them and 2) get some finer embossing powder!  On the brighter side there were no bloopers, so it wasn't all bad!

Have a great week everyone and thanks for reading.

Delicate Asters in Pink

Hello again.  This week I am back to my one of my favourites ... die cut flowers.  What I liked about this one was that it has plenty of dimension but the flowers are not actually very deep so it just went in a normal envelope (although I did put a piece of light card at the front of the envelope). 

Apologies (again!) for the photography, I thought these pictures weren't too bad but when I uploaded them I realised that at least two of them are a bit blurred. 

This was for my aunt in Ireland who was 90 this year and I thought I would try doing it back to front, in other words stamping white onto coloured card ... or not so white as it turned out.

I started by die cutting lots of the Heartfelt Creations Delicate Asters out.  I didn't pre stamp them and then cut them as I thought I would try just popping them on the stamp after I had cut them, it was irritating that no matter which embossing powder I tried, I couldn't get it to look white it always looked cream as you can see from the pics.  For the middle of the flowers I just brushed the ends on to a Perfect Medium pad and then dipped them in embossing powder.  After that I just put a pearl in the middle and I was quite happy with them (apart from the white looking cream!)

Next up was the background, I used the Embossalicious Rose Garden embossing folder and although it looks okay once the card was put together the embossing was definitely lighter in some patches than in others.  On the picture below, looking at the pink card, the top left is quite strongly embossed and the bottom right is a bit fainter - this could be down to my worn plates on my HappyCut but it doesn't happen with any other folders, so I'm not sure. After it was embossed I matted it onto a piece of white that I had pierced with my Tim Holz ruler.

I then cut out two of the Botannical Swirls and Accents corners, I love these, they look so effective and it makes the card as a whole a bit less pink.  As before I taped them together first before sticking them down so I didn't get wet glue everywhere.  My favourite nesties, Labels 1 was next to put the sentiment on, and I cut the larger shape out of Decorative Labels 1.  I was going to ink round the plain smaller label but decided I wanted it to stay white as the pink was getting a bit much.  If I did this card or similar again I would definitely use a paler pink.  All that was left was to cut out the sentiment with my Britannia Word dies and add some pearls and it was done.

No blooper this time either, although there was a lot of swearing under my breath when I was trying to stick the sentiment onto the label - I really must get a fine tip for my wet glue!

That's all for this time, thanks for looking.