Embossed Felt

Even though it's been a 3 week trigger, I've only just found time to play along with the gorgeous image that Kath chose to inspire us all http://www.moxiefabworld.com/2013/04/tuesday-trigger-pretty-little-petits.html

I really loved this image (well it features cake and I LOVE cake!) but I really liked the thick texture of the woodgrain icing background and I really wanted to replicate that element of it in my card.  So to get the depth I wanted, rather than embossing paper with my SU Woodgrain folder, I decided to try embossing felt - the problem was it doesn't "hold" the detail, it just springs back to practically flat and normal.  So I was toying with the idea of trying a diluted pva on it but I was worried I'd ruin my folder, when I hit upon the idea an old fashioned household product - spray starch!   (Apparently you use it when ironing, but as I don't really know where the iron is kept I wouldn't know about that lol!)   However, it does work BRILLIANTLY in this instance.   I simply trimmed an oval of white felt, sprayed it heavily with starch and then popped it in the folder and through my big kick.   I rolled it back to the centre to keep the fold shut and left it there for 20 mins so it could "dry" in situ.  It came out a little damp still so I left it flat to air dry over night and washed the folder straight away.  In the morning I had a beautiful little crisp oval with deep embossed detail (it really doesn't show up nearly as well as I'd like on the photo) with lots of thick dimension from the felt.

For the rest of the elements of my card I took inspiration from the pretty cherry blossom flowers on top of the petits fours - I stamped the cherry blossom twig from the delightful Happy Everything stamp set from Clearly Besottted and embossed it with white EP and then coloured it with watercolour pencils and a waterbrush adding a gentle blue highlight around with a broken china distress marker.  I fussy cut it leaving a border and mounted it over my felt oval.

I brought in the darker pink from the flowers for the background to my sentiment which is also from Clearly Besotted, this time the newly released Just Fabulous set.  I then made one large pink petits four as a pink mat behind the oval and mounted onto a small square card.  This is one of my favourite recent makes - much more girly than my normal style but really pretty.

I'm also going to link it up the "just add woodgrain" challenge over at Just Add Ink this week - http://just-add-ink.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/jai165-just-addwoodgrain.html

It's turning out to be a Clearly Besotted Day - will be back with another post featuring more of their new stamps shortly.