Elegance and Inspiration

The inspiration for this card, one of the challenges for last weekend's Crush mini VSN at Splitcoast Stampers, was a vintage chocolate box which you can see and read about here.

The chocolate box, an elaborately decorated and absolutely exquisite Whitman's sampler box, featured a profile of the bust of a woman who has flowing golden hair adorned with a wreath, and the box is decorated in mosaic tiles set in gold. In a word, it's gorgeous.

I just happened to have a scrap of this checked paper from a Debbie Mumm paper stack. It was the perfect paper to recreate the mosaic effect. I briefly -- and I mean briefly -- considered outlining the little squares in gold. When I came to my senses, I decided to put it through the Cuttlebug using the textile folder and then I ran a gold ink pad over the embossing. I used an embossed gold paper for the card base - reminiscent of the metallic gold box cover that was the inspiration piece.

I knew that the subtle gold of the ballerina would be lost against the brilliant gold embossing and bright pink and green of my attempt at making a mosaic panel, so I softened the background with a panel of vellum and edged both the vellum and the patterned paper with gold.

The way I do this is to brush the edges with my large ink pad and then dust them with embossing powder. In this case, I used Versamark and my regular gold embossing powder (not fine detail powder). Once you coat the edges with powder, if there are areas that are too heavy, you can brush a little of the powder off with a paint brush.

I cut the ballerina with a QuicKutz die that I ran through the Cuttlebug using A, B, and C plates. I gilded her with Perfect Pearls. I simply ran the Perfect Medium pad over her and dusted away. The flowers are a two stamp process with a Sugarloaf set (Easter/Spring Collection, #50678). I stamped and embossed the outline stamp for both the blossoms and the leaves in gold and then stamped again with the solid "filler" stamp in pink and green, and added a few blooms just to embellish. The colors I chose for the ink looked like they were made for the paper. (They're from Versafine, and you can find all of the details of all of materials here in my gallery at Splitcoast Stampers.)

The floral heart is a plastic trinket that came with a set of vintage buttons and ornaments. It was originally ivory, but I "painted" it with gold ink. Once it was dry, I simply placed it over the knot and pulled the ribbon tails through the center of it.

The ribbon, from Offray, is an inch and a half wide with gold threading and adds a rich finale to the card.