On Your Retirement

My Mother asked me to make a “special” card for a friend of her’s that is retiring.

Special’s my kind of card making, and I love to make a coordinating box, with the card nestling in layers of tissue paper for that extra special touch.



This is also my first play with my extended Cameo Silhouette cutting mat – I used to the cut the fancy edge card blank with the matching frame. Very happy with the result. I will be using this technique again on other shapes – it was a doddle to do.




Card Recipe:
Stamp: Kanban
Colouring Mediums: Momento Ink Pad Cocoa, Brown Pigment Ink, Promarker Pens, Tattered Angels Glimmer Spritz
Paper & Card: Kanban Printed Cardstock, Stardream Opal, Opalescent Vellum
Tools: Spellbinders, Silhouette Cameo, BigShot Pro, Quickutz
Embellishments: double satin ribbon 10mm & 3mm, hand-made beaded Hat Pins, pearls, mulberry roses, gardenia & cheery blossom.

To make this card, using my Silhouette Cameo, I cut the card base from stardream cardstock, the frame from Kanban Printed Cardstock and the flourish background from Opalescent Vellum. Additional swirls were die-cut from a Quickutz die in my Big-Shot Pro from both the Kanban Printed Cardstock and Opalescent Vellum.

I then embossed an offcut of stardream card through my Big-Shot Pro using a spellbinders embossing folder. Once embossed, this offcut was paper-pieced together with an offcut of coordinating Kanban Printed Cardstock and the join was covered by a strip of double satin ribbon, then die-cut with Spellbinders Labels 1.

My brown pigment ink was not as deep as I wanted so I inked up the stamp first with a layer of Momento Cocoa and then added a layer of brown pigment ink. This was then embossed with clear powder and coloured with promarker pens. The finished image was then cut from the smaller Labels 1 die, using the ‘outside the die’ technique so that the tassle came below the cut line of the die.

I printed my greeting onto an offcut of Kanban Printed Cardstock and die-cut it out.





To ensemble, I mounted the flourish background onto the backing card, topped off with the frame and inked all the edges. The mounted stamped image and greeting were added . To embellish, I used mulberry paper rosebuds, gardenia & cheery blossom flowers, handmade HatPins, flat-backed pearls and a double-satin ribbon bow. Finally, the entire project was spritzed with Tattered Angels Glimmer Spritz, for a subtle shimmer.

Hope you like this; do leave a comment if this has pleased you.