This week I am featuring the beautiful Elegant Leaves Bundle. This is an awesome bundle to use for Fall cards but change up the colors and it could be used any time of the year.
For today's card I used traditional fall colors, Cherry Cobbler, Garden Green and Crushed Curry--all of which are front the Regals Color Family. However rather than using a tone-on-tone color for the veining in the leaves I used Secret Sea ink. I got this idea from a sample card in Stampin' Up!'s Fall Seasonal Mini catalog. It really makes the leaves pop!
The center focal point was made with the Party Banners dies and the top layer was embossed with the Softly Woven Embossing Folder.
If you look closely, you can sese the subtle plaid embossing. I love that it is an all-over subtle design.
For the inside of the card I stamped another Garden Green Leaf and then used the woodgrain die from the bundle to decorate the left edge of the Basic White cardstock.
One thing I learned when using this die is that you want to make sure the cardstock that you are cutting is larger than the die on all sides. If not, it will fall apart! Guess how I learned that! 😓
The happy thanksgiving sentiment is from the Soiree Salutations stamp set -- also in the new Fall Seasonal Catalog. If you overlooked this set, look again! It has 17 greetings for all the major holidays and more! Plus as an added bonus, they are sized to be used with the Triple Banner Punch. Obviously, I didn't need that for the inside of the card, but it would make a quick and easy sentiment for the front of a card.
I think I am in love! This Lustrous Leaves Hot Foil bundle makes beautiful fall leaves. And even more exciting is that by using the new Reverse Hot Foil Die I was able to get two cards using the same piece of foil!
The above card is the first one I made with the bundle which includes Decorative Masks as well as dies. It hot foiled 5 leaves at once, and then the masks were used with Blending Brushes to color all of them before using a coordinating cutting die to separate them.
I used only one of the 5 masks to color the large leaves. Another of the 5 masks makes the small, background leaves that you see on the card front and on the envelope. Aren't they fun? I just blended multiple colors in different places with the mask to create the colorful background.
Since I used gold foil to hot foil the veins of the leaves, I chose Gold Foil Specialty Paper for the border and circle. The circle was die cut with a Stylish Shapes Die from the center of the Perennial Postage mat layer, which makes better use of the more expensive foil specialty paper. Even if I'm not planning to use the die cut on my current card, I always try to remember to die cut something from the center of the foil layer and save it for later. There is no point in covering up all that beautiful foil!
I used the same small leaves mask to add a few, colorful leaves in the lower corner of the card. The leaves and the narrow Gold Foil strip coordinates the inside of the card nicely with the front of the card.
Now to Card #2 ...
When you use the Hot Foil Dies, there is always a leftover piece of foil with the "negative" image of whatever it was you foiled. In this case, the negative image was a piece of foil that had the gold removed where the leaf veins were.
By using our brand new (just released this month) Reverse Hot Foil Die you can use this piece of leftover foil to add the negative image on cardstock. It may be difficult to see due to the glare on the foil, but hopefully you can see the white outline images of the 5 leaves on the gold foil. What an awesome way to use the leftover foil!
I only used three of the leaves on the first card, so I used the remaining two leaves on this card to set off my sentiment from Fern & Flora.
A couple of torn strips from the gorgeous Sunflower Fields Designer Series paper was used to decorate the left edge of the card.
The torn strips were repeated on the inside of the card to also give it a bit of color. The happy thanksgiving greeting is from Soiree Salutations, another new greeting set from the September - December Catalog. FYI -- Although not used here, these sentiments are sized to work perfectly with the Tripple Banner Punch. Don't you love it when something new coordinates with something you already own?
Grab your favorite beverage and watch this video to see how both Card #1 and Card #2 were made.
Use the following links to download a PDF tutorial for each of today's cards.
A couple of weeks ago I realized that this beautiful Dry Brushed Metallic Specialty Paper was NOT RETIRED. For some reason, I thought it had retired and so I had moved it to my retired bin. This foil paper is so beautiful and I thought it would work wonderfully for a fall card.
If you have followed me at all you probably know that Summer is my favorite time of the year, so when the weather starts getting chilly and the flowers and leaves start looking worse for wear, it doesn't necessarily make me happy. Don't get me wrong, I do love the changing colors of our trees here in Michigan. I just don't love some of the other things that come with fall -- like putting the boat in storage, raking leaves, etc. I know it's weird, but I'd prefer shoveling snow than raking leaves.
But the Dry Brushed Metallic Paper makes me happy, so I'm using it on this autumn themed card made with the Autumn Leaves Stamp Set and Dies.
The large maple leaf was heat embossed with Copper Embossing Powder and the DisINKtive Autumn Leaves stamps create very beautiful, embossed images. With DisINKtive stamps I always like to make a test sample first when I want to heat emboss with one because sometimes the DisINKtive images don't work as well with heat embossing, but these Autumn Leaves images are great! Even the DisINKtive shading shows up in the embossing.
One of my favorite color combinations is Copper Clay and Pretty Peacock, so I chose the version of the Dry Brushed Metallic Paper that has the blue shades and matted it to Pretty Peacock cardstock. The gold ring behind the leaves was die cut with two dies from Deckled Circled dies.
The sentiments for the front and the inside of the card are from the Autumn Leaves Stamp Set. I think I'm going to send this card to special friend for Thanksgiving.
The dark mat colors of Copper Clay and Pretty Peacock don't show up as well as I would like in the photos, but in real life it is a very pretty color combination.