One of the things that my secret pal (now revealed to be Jill – thanks, Jill) gave me over the crop weekend was some antique brads. Brads, for those of you who don’t know (like me a few months ago) are embellishments that are attached to the card by making a hole and pushing the two prongs through and opening them out behind the card to hold them in place. The Stampin’ Up! antique brads are really pretty and I’ve admired them on my sister’s cards but haven’t quite mustered up the courage to use them. Once I had received them I set myself a challenge to make a card with them. I figured that the Stampin’ Up! Bright and Beautiful stamp set would be the perfect setting.
I may possibly have mentioned previously that I love heat embossing! I decided to emboss the second largest star from the Bright and Beautiful stamp set in silver on night of navy and then I cut it out with the matching star framelit. I then cut out the next biggest size star in the brushed silver cardstock. Adhering these together looked really good. Next I heat embossed the sentiment (also from Bright and Beautiful) in silver on the night of navy base. After I attached the star to the base I punched a hole in the stars using my piercing tool and attached a brad. Caro gave me advice here, I think I was going to add one that was a bit too big. I really liked how this came together and Jen My Upline was so happy to see that I’d progressed! I think there’s even a picture on facebook of me proudly holding my First Brad Card!
Since I had stars on this card, it made sense to decorate the envelope with stars also. I dry embossed the envelope flap with the Lucky Stars embossing folder.
The advice is to get a Stampin’ Up! piercing mat for paper piercing and attaching brads. I haven’t tried paper piercing but I’ve found another method for making the hole to attach the brads. Admittedly the piercing mat is only $4.95 so it’s not a big deal, but I bought the clear block caddy a while ago so that I could transport my blocks to the crop. The caddy came with the spaces for the blocks filled with foam which appeared very much like the piercing mat. So I used the insert for the largest block as my piercing mat. It worked very well.