One of the things I really enjoy doing is making birthday cards for the young adults I work with. Everyone on staff signs the card and then I give it to the student. It’s fun and allows me to play with different styles and techniques. Sometimes it doesn’t work out so well and I have to start over, but more often it turns out really good and I end up with a card that matches the style of the person I’m making it for. This was one of those cards.
I had never embossed on vellum or used this card stock or used this stamp set’s Happy Birthday sentiment, so I thought why not and came up with this.
Equipment
- Sketched Flowers by Simon Says Stamp
- Versamark Embossing Ink Pad
- Recollections Detail Black Embossing Powder
- Recollections Embossing Powder in Champagne (linked is Ranger Liquid Platinum because it’s very close.)
- Vellum (From my stash, but similar to the linked product.)
- Hero Arts Card Stock from December 2018 & April 2019 Card Kits (Both the kits I used are sold out, but Hero Arts has unique card kits every month!)
- Gold Sequins from a Scrapping for Less Kit but similar to these
- Nuvo Deluxe Adhesive
- Zots Medium Adhesive Dots
What I Did
This was a really quick card to put together. I started out the way I frequently start on projects: By rummaging around in my stash for one thing, not being able to find it, thinking my entire idea has to be scrapped, before finding something else in my stash and being inspired in an entirely different direction.
Hero Arts tends to send half sheets of very thick card stock with their kits. I pulled the deep burgundy from the April 2019 kit and the gold from the December 2018 kit. I put both card stock and stamp into my MISTI and arranged how I wanted the image to sit across the card front. I then used my powder bag to remove any static electricity and stamped it in Versamark, covered the image in the Recollections Champagne embossing powder, and heat set the whole thing. I loved the way it looked and didn’t want to trim it down, but when I placed the gold card stock behind it, it looked stunning. I trimmed off a quarter inch from the left side of the image and attached a 3/8″ slice of gold card stock to the back so it peeked out on the left. I then went ahead and attached that to the card base.
For the sentiment, I pulled the Happiest of Birthdays to You stamp from the same set. I cut a piece of vellum and placed that in my MISTI. I then used my powder bag, applied Versamark again, and stamped out the sentiment. I covered that with black embossing powder and heat set it. Sometimes the powder bag doesn’t work so well and before I noticed it, I had heat set a few stray grains of black on the vellum. If you look closely, you can juuuuuuust see them.
I decided to use glue dots to adhere the vellum to the card front. To hide the glue dots, I placed gold sequins over those spots. I love how this card came out. Sometimes things don’t go exactly how you want them, but that will frequently lead to a better idea.
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CraftyAs 