dry embossing | The Contented Crafter

Here I am again with more cards – what can I say, I’m on a roll!

Before we get to the Christmas card design I thought you might like to see the blue card that was shown in the second photo of the previous post as it is now finished and I’m really excited – I made ‘who-would-know-they-aren’t-really-pewter’ flowers 🙂

What do you think – have I managed to capture it well enough in the photo?

While I was still in the playing around with embossing folders mode of a few days back I also made some Christmas cards – yay me, Christmas in hand already!

I picked up a couple of Tim Holtz Christmas themed embossing folders for a song in a sale early this year. One is no good for me as it features snowflakes and icicles and that is not our Christmas experience – but I liked the old fashioned swirliness of this one:

All I did was matt up the embossed and inked cardstock and then I went over the raised letters with a water based pen. Easy-peasy

Same process with this next one and then I filled in the centrre part with gold metallic pen:

The next two are created using Spellbinders ‘M-Bossibilities’ EL-014 [which gives a lovely deep emboss] on white cardstock. I inked over the raised areas using old paper distress ink in the centre and two shades of green around the edges. The embossed card is matted a total of three times – first to dark green cardstock. The ribbon is attached at the back, the greeting strip is added and then the bow is attached with a brad. When all those bits are in place the second matt was added, I used brown paper on both these cards.

The flowers are another Spellbinders die ‘Poinsettias’ the large leaves were cut from green cardstock and had a good coat of glossy accents spread over them and were left to dry overnight. I dribbled a bit of glittery stuff over the petals when the flowers are made up and hot glued a half pearl in the centre of each one.

The greetings are stickers which are practically idiot proof.

And finally, as there are still dozens of tiny butterflies lying about all over the work table from my enthusiastic experimentation with faux metal I used three on each card as well.

Detail:

More detail:

This is all so easy to do – and makes for highly detailed cards whose only drawback is I can’t make envelopes big enough to contain them! Drats – if you have a recipe I’d love to hear it!

The last two cards are 21 x 15 cm [81/2 x 6″].

Thanks for coming by and having a look, I love that you did 🙂

Two weeks have gone by and the work on this project is not going according to plan ….. But I am remaining true to my usual way of working, and continue merrily on with my hit or miss style

I’ve been working on different embellishments that will be added into the book – most of them still requiring finishing touches as I kept running out of supplies – and as I buy most of my stuff on-line there can be a five day delay between ordering and receiving.

If I discover, say on a Friday afternoon [and this actually has happened] that I need more embossing powder it can be Thursday before it gets to me – depending on the supplier. It can really stop me in my tracks – so I’ve spent a bit of time checking everything this week and making a list…………. [Yay me!]

So consequently all I have to show at the moment is the layering process which is underway.

What you are about to see is simply phase two and there are at least another two steps to be taken in this process – And just to keep your interest up [hopefully] I’ll finish with a quick peek at a possible phase three page.

This is a page towards the back of the book. Card-stock has been torn, dry embossed [the script] and then attacked with some ‘Old Paper’ ink to age it up. The edging of lace is done the same way – but this may well disappear altogether as I don’t really like it……

The strip of fabric edging on the right side is loose so that more pages can be tucked under it later on. Most of what you can now see will soon disappear…..

A close-up of the lower left page.

This is a page towards the front of the book – it’s actually two pages as the curved part is the edge of a flip page, narrower and incorporating a pocket for more embellishments to be tucked into, and the bird belongs on the following page – I quite like that you can see this glimpse of what comes next..

A couple of pages on you’ll find this:

Another flip page, made to look like an envelope with lace edging and ribbon tie. Well it doesn’t just look like an envelope, it is an envelope and will hold a couple of poems inside.

This is the page before the envelope – that’s the back of the envelope on the right hand side. The page on the left has its first layer on and the next pic shows what I am considering as layer three for this particular page:

I can’t adhere anything as yet as I still haven’t decided what text I am going with – but two strong contenders are Khalil Gibran – selected extracts from ‘The Prophet’ – or a selection of my favourite Rumi verses…….decisions, decisions!! But once that decision is made and the verses all printed out then everything will come together – I’m hoping another two weeks will see it done………

Stay tuned!

Thanks for taking the time to drop by – I love that you came!