There is so much to love about the new Gracious Floral set from Memory Box Open Studio. I'm a big fan of slimline cards, so I decided to create a high contrast card of mostly black and white. I used the Gracious Floral 3D Embossing Folder with Neenah Classic Crest 110lb cardstock. Here's a tip: spritz your cardstock on one or both sides with one single spritz of water just before you send it through your machine sandwiched inside the folder. This will relax the paper fibers, allowing them to bend instead of crack. Of course, if your cardstock has ink on it, just do the back only.
After I had dry embossed 4 of these super detailed flowers, I laid the die from the Gracious Floral Stamp and Die set on top and cut out all 4. This flattened out the dry embossing some, which I expected. I simply put the die cut piece back into my embossing folder (no need to spritz again with water) and made sure it was sitting in the "grooves" where it was before. I ran it through again and got these gorgeous results. I had the idea of putting my embossed die cuts on a black background and I chose a pearlescent black cardstock.
I knew I needed a pop of color to bring out parts of the flower - I could have chosen virtually any color and I picked a deep pink. A bright curry-like yellow would have looked just as good. I used a fingertip blending sponge (they kind of sit on your finger like a thimble) and swiped the deep pink ink on the flower centers. I glued the flowers on the black background and then used my trimmer to cut the entire thing down to 3" x 8.5". My card would be 3.5" x 8.5", so I used a matching dark pink piece of cardstock as the base and glued the black cardstock with my embossed flowers in the middle of it, leaving a stripe of pink on each side.
There are SO many great sentiments in the Gracious Floral Stamp Set and I thought the 'just for you' sentiment could work for almost anything. I stamped it in Versamark on heavy black cardstock and then heat embossed with Ranger's white embossing powder. I used the matching die that came with the stamp and die set to cut it out. I used foam adhesive to pop it off the card and mailed it to a dear relative.
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