Celebrate!

 

I'm always looking for a way to make a birthday card a little different-looking.  With Valentine's Day in February and my dad's birthday on the 25th (he's 96 this year-wow!) I thought I'd try to do something in red and gold.

I decided on an ivory card base with a heart border.  I knew I wanted some gold matting and added some pink patterned paper (Bo Bunny) and some plain red also.  I used several Frantic stamper dies to decorate and the Perfect Layers rulers to make my mats quickly and ...well, perfectly ( no lie, these are great).

I'm a blingy kind of person and I used red glitter card.  I wanted a really nice flower so I layered green suede paper for the stem.  I really love crepe ribbon with its wrinkly texture.  I use it on a lot of my projects and I did here. I wanted to add something to fill up the right side of my card and thought it would be fun to have a set of goblets - to toast his birthday.

Now, guess what he material is that I used for a background mat - you know that bright gold, wrinkly paper?  It's crepe paper!  Yup!  Just like the kind we used as kids - except this kind is has a metal coating on it to give it that gold look.  I found this special crepe paper (and tons of colors as well as Desden Foil or German scrap) at Castle In The Air.  I like it so much that Ive added it to my favorites!

Thanks for stopping by!

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Products used:

• Frantic Stamper Precision Dies
• Oval Nested Frames (flower die included)
• Love Filled Heart
• Wine Bottle and Glass (set of two dies)
• Heart on my Sleeve Edger
• One inch base - Square die

Wine Country Bracelet

I've had the Frantic Stamper Bottle die for a while and have been thinking of creating a piece of jewelry.  I like shrink plastic and have been experimenting lately with it again.  Each new die I use with shrink plastic does have it's own challenge.  This time I have learned that not all die cuts are created equal and each one has to be heated carefully if I want the finished product to come out right.
 

The bottle was easy to cut out of shrink plastic and heat shrink it.  To start I sanded the piece of shrink plastic so that it would hold color from chalk.  I then colored four sections, each representing a different kind of wine.  Then I cut out each bottle.  When I was heating each piece separately, I held my heat gun about 3-4 inches above my die cut so that the heat would go to the piece evenly.  I held my piece with some scissors (I really need to get a better tool for this!) As each piece shrinks, the color darkens.

I added some rub ons to decorate my bottles. Then I just added them to a chain for a bracelet.  I coiled some gold tone wire around the neck which does look pretty.

Notice that I used white rub ons for the purple bottle. I thought the color was too dark for black rub ons. I think this worked out perfectly.

I hope that you try this out with some of your dies!

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