Elegant Gift Card

I made this card for yet another swap - and now I am finished with swaps for a while! This one was for a 3 x 3 card folded gift card with a quote inside. Once again I was working in a fairly small size.



I chose my basic card shape from A Child's Year - there are so many great cards and tags of this cartridge. It is the third from the left on the bottom row - highlighted in the screen shot above.



I could cut only four cards on a 12 x 12 mat. I made sure to hide all of the score marks for folding (if you have taken the Basic Cards class with me you know that these are a pet peeve of mine - I think the cuts make the card very untidy). The design of this card includes cut out areas along the fold and the card is very easy to fold without any scoring at this size.



The medallion for the front of the card is found on the Storybook cartridge - the key is highlighted in this screen shot of the keypad.



I didn't want the medallion to be quite so lacy, so I used "hide selected contour" to eliminate the middle row of cuts. In the screen shot above the medallion on the right is the cut as it appears on the cartridge and the medallion on the left is the one I cut after hiding the contours.



I set up the mat to cut 14 medallions. Unfortunately, since the contours do not stay hidden when you copy and paste an element in Design Studio, I had to do a lot of contour hiding!



I punched 1 1/4 inch circles from the scrap cardstock and adhered them to the backs of the medallions with the solid side of the double-sided paper showing through the center cuts



Next, I added a large pearl embellishment to the center of each medallion. These came from the Martha Stewart line and are larger than most that I have seen.



I used foam squares to adhere the medallions to the fronts of the cards.



Here you can see the raised effect - I like the dimension you get when using the foam squares. I dotted Stickles in the "cinnamon" color around the edges of the front of the cards.



Our hostess insists that we sign our work (and rightly so!). I added my signature along the fold on the back, as discretely as possible using a pen that nearly matched reddish brown color in the paper.



I punched 39 little flowers with my Creative Memories "Meadow Micro-Maker" punch (here is a LINK to more info about this punch). The punch cuts four small shapes, frog, flower, fish and butterfly and the size was perfect for these cards. I punched these from some of the scraps of the two sided paper I used for the card base.



Here is the inside of the card - the quote says, "The only way to have a friend is to be one" Ralph Waldo Emerson. I stamped it with brown ink.



Here are all of the finished cards just before I packed them up for mailing.



These are not colors I frequently choose, but I do think that the colors worked well together and they certainly have an autumn look.



Can you believe that I found this leaf on the deck today? I don't know how we could be so close to the end of the summer. I love it when the leaves turn but I am not ready for Fall to start yet! I hope you enjoy the last few weeks of vacation - back to school will be here far too soon!

(Jen and I are teaching just a couple of classes next week - it is a busy time with school starting for many people. We are thinking about making some changes in our scheduling of classes and possibly offering some classes on tape since we have had many requests for classes that can be viewed by the student whenever the time is convenient for them. We may be asking for some feedback in a poll or survey on the Let me Show you How to Do that blog soon - in the meanwhile, if you want more information about the classes, here is a LINK).)