I decided to make a card to celebrate Chinese New Year but I don’t have any stamps of goats so I have chosen to concentrate on red and gold instead. At the recent crop weekend, I saw an embossed resist technique using a brayer, elastic bands, embossing powder and sponging. I simplified it for this card.

I liberated a couple of different width elastic bands from the kitchen drawer and wrapped them around my brayer ensuring that they crossed and twisted. I then took a piece of real red cardstock and after rubbing it with the embossing buddy to remove static, inked up my brayer with versamark and rolled it across the card in a couple of directions. Then I sprinkled on gold embossing powder and heated it. It creates a very cool looking custom made DSP.

Whilst I was contemplating what could stand up to this background, the mailman brought me the Stampin’ Up! Butterflies Thinlits dies and I knew I had to use them immediately! I cut out the middle sized butterfly in real red and in gold foil. I’ve heard that you can use dryer sheets so that you don’t have to poke out all the cutouts but I found that I got dryer debris on my cutting plates and on the die. I decided to just poke out the pieces with my piercing tool. I cut another piece of real red just large enough to fit the butterflies. I glued the gold foil butterfly flat to the card stock and then attached the real red butterfly just in the middle so that the wings give a three dimensional effect.

I mounted this onto a base of real red. I decided that this card needed a slightly larger envelope so as to not crush the butterfly’s wings. I took a piece of 8.5″ by 8.5″ real red card stock and using the envelope punch board created a 4.5″ by 6″ envelope. I used sticky strip to glue the envelope together and did so fairly loosely so that there’s a bit of extra room. It fits perfectly! I then embossed the envelope flap to match the background.