Welcome to my crafty blog. Today’s card will be heading off to a colleagues who’s just been appointed to a new job, and I’m delighted for him. As often happens, he’s been covering it on a temporary basis, but has now been permanently confirmed in the job. I took inspiration from the current challenge over at As You See It – it’s a recipe, which isn’t a type of challenge I’ve done before.

I started with a piece of brown card, cut slightly smaller than a 5×7 card blank, and embossed it using the Stampin’ Up! ‘old world paper’ folder. As it’s a square folder, it didn’t go right down to the bottom of the card, so I positioned it with the embossing ending three quarters down, as I was going to add a strip of paper across it there, and the plain card would sit below it. Once embossed I die cut the leafy circle from the SU ‘wreath builder’ die set.

I then took my piece of backing paper, and stamped one of the small leafy sprigs from SU’s ‘forever ferns’ set over the middle, using ‘terracotta’ Artistry Ink. I masked the edge of the paper before starting, as the brown card was cut smaller than this piece and I didn’t want the leafy pattern to show around the edge.

I then mounted the brown card onto the backing paper. I had planned at this point to reattach the inner part of the die cut, so the leaves were a negative image with the pattern showing through. I have to be honest – it did not look good! I tried adding the brown leafy wreath back in but there wasn’t enough contrast, so I cut another one in a terracotta card to pick up the colour of the ink.

Finally, I cut another strip of the backing paper, and stamped the sentiment onto it in dark brown (it’s from the SU ‘beautiful friendship’ set). The recipe included twine, so I wrapped a piece around the strip of paper before attaching it to the card front. I then snipped a few leaves from another circle (I just put the die against the corner of a piece of paper as I didn’t want the whole thing) and attached them to the card front with foam pads.

Thanks for dropping in. I think I hit the whole brief for this challenge – it’s a bit more tricky using several different elements but it worked out OK in the end.