More brown cards

I know it's not Autumn yet, but I love the browny vintage colours, even if I never make fussy lacy cards!

Martha Stewart border punch $4 at Ross! Butterfly is a metal charm, and sentiments are from a printed sheet.

Trying out my texture plates. Top card uses a diecut.

And just so you know that I don't ALWAYS make brown cards here's a couple of oddments with my new border punch.

Cards... at last!

We were both sick for three weeks so I didn't make any cards for a long time. This week I got a surprise package of rubber stamps, and I had a play with them. I've never used large background stamps before and I didn't have any luck in stamping them. I was about to give up in despair when I thought of using the Bigshot to compress them. They didn't fit in with the white backing, but I have a felt piercing mat that was just the right thickness to make up a sandwich - I used the clear mats on the outside, the black embossing mat and black plastic pad, and my felt piercing mat with the stamp and cardstock in the middle and when you added them altogether I got a perfect image! I tried it with a few other stamps and it didn't work so well - they were too thin still. But it worked great with the full-sized background stamps that I was just given.

Here are the cards I made... I finished them with some gorgeous diecuts I got on clearance at Michaels last month. They're so cute that I wish I'd bought more packets! The 'brown' is actually gorgeous metallic copper on acetate and it makes wonderful cards. I love metallics! The flowers have glitter on them but that's okay - I just can't send them to Operation Write Home. I want to make some cards for church and that's a start. There are two skills I have that are of value to other people - cooking/baking, and making stuff... I need to stop worrying about what other people might thing and use them.

My new toy

This is what came in the mail on Friday...

My first embossing templates arrived today... and I played with one this afternoon to see what it could do.

My first card. Simple embossed strips. The black and purple are punched but not embossed. Butterfly was a RAK. It would work out better if the card front was assembled and THEN embossed so that the pattern is continuous, but this looked okay with the other stuff on top of it.

I embossed a cardstock shield, then flipped the embossing over and inked up the reverse. I think I like it better this way than with the lines coloured! It needed a see-through sentiment that wouldn't distract from the embossing, so I used clear lettering stickers.

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Embossed directly on a card base with a coloured outside and white inside, then sanded. I had to trim the edges down to neaten it, but the sanding hides the face that the embossing doesn't quite go all the way to the inside edge.