60th Birthday Card

I was asked to make a special big A4 folded card for my friend Joey to give to her daughter.
I asked how to pronounce the name and it's easy...Annie, just with the unusual spelling. I used lilac cardstock with the teal and it looked so nice. All the wording and the 60 were done on the computer.
The butterflies were cut out and embossed with the Cuttlebug. I dry-brushed Diamond Stickles onto the butterflies, but it's sadly not noticeable in the photos.
The lacy border is punched with a Fab Scraps Punch.
The positioning of the pearls was thanks to a lovely plastic template made by my good friend, Paola, and the flower and feather arrangement are also inspired by her. If you haven't seen Paola's blog, do yourself a favour and look here!

I like to create a matching envelope so it compliments the card instead of it just being plain & boring. I tried to print the name directly on the envelope, but the printer wasn't happy with that idea and scrunched up the name somewhat then left black smudges on the sides! So it's far easier to print the name on a piece of white paper and layer it on...nice & neat. The stamp in the corner wasn't used on the card, but the theme is continued.
Just a little tip here...the Broken China Distress Inkpad is delightfully close to Teal / Turquoise, so compliments the card really well.

December 2010 Workshop Cards

This was the inspiration for my Christmas workshop cards that I found somewhere on the internet. Thanks to Amy (see watermark copyright) for the idea.

This was my version of the above card. the tag was created by punching a slot on each end using the Fiskars Ribbon Punch then corner rounding it and threading the ribbon through.
The white paper was torn to resemble snow.

I was suddenly faced with the challenge of making the Santa's outfit red; after all it's a solid image that comes out black when stamped. I considered stamping it in red, but then he'd have red boots and all the outlines would also be red...not on!
Then I remembered all those little bottles of colour embossing powder in my stash.
So I coloured the areas I wanted to change to red using an Emboss Dual Pen, poured the powder on, heated it and voila, Father Christmas the way he should look!
It was then just a matter of colouring the belt with black and the buckle in gold. The white 'fur' got glue and "snow".

As I have some ladies that don't celebrate Christmas, I then decided to look for other stamps that could be used the same way for other occasion cards and found the Handstand Clown and the Owls. The Metallic and even the multicoloured embossing powders came in useful here.