Spunky Cards: Happy Birthday Chris!!!

Good morning! Do you have a few minutes? Great. I want to share with you how I made this very COOL birthday card for my nephew.

This is one of those cards that evolved. Sometimes I know exactly what I want to do. Other times, I start with kind of a plan and I have about a 50% success rate for good results. This is one of my best! For this card, I wanted to use the dragon stamp and a special technique called emboss resist. I do have to add a disclaimer about the dragon stamp. It's not SU! I bought it before I was a demonstrator for my nephew when he turned 7 or 8 and since then the dragon is on every one of his birthday cards. Some of you may know that dragon and I have a love-hate relationship but with every birthday card we get along a little bit better and over the years we may become friends after all. But we don't want to talk about that. Let's see how I made this very cool card. What colors do boys like? I have two princess pink girls, so sometimes I am at a loss about boys. Black sounds cool for an almost teenager. Can't go wrong with that.

The black cardstock itself seemed a little dull. I ran through the Big Shot with a texture plate to give it some dimension.

Then I got out some white paper and decided that Only Orange would make a great contrast and I stamped the dragon all over my paper.

Next, I got out my alphabet stamps (Schoolbook Serif Alphabet) and Versamark pad and stamped his name diagonally across the dragons. I sprinkled clear embossing powder over it and embossed it. You can kind of see it here:

The next step is the WOW factor. Get out your brayer, ink up in Taken with Teal classic ink and just roll all over the paper. This is one of my favorite things to do because no two pieces turn out exactly alike. I rolled and reinked several times because I wanted the paper quite dark. As you can see, the name doesn't change color because the embossing put a clear layer across the letters that will not die. Isn't it cool???

All of this turned out really cool so far. Now it came time to assemble the card. I wanted to back it with Only Orange paper only to find out that I am just about out. I had one little piece left (HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN TO ME?) and it wasn't big enough. So I cut it into four squares and laid them behind my centerpiece and I liked the look. Now what next?

First, I framed each Only Orange piece with Taken with Teal paper but that looked kind of boring. So I changed two out for Whisper White. Much better.

Before I glued everything together, I put it down for one last look. Something is missing. How about framing the centerpiece in black and then putting it together.

The black frame made all the difference. I already had the Stampin' Dimensionals on the back of it, when I thought to also add two black brads. I REALLY like the way it turned out.