FOLLOW-UP CARD -- FAUX PRESSED METAL

As promised in THIS POST, where I showed you the various samples I'd made with the Faux Pressed Metal technique, here is the resulting card I made from one of the samples. This is a birthday card for my husband.

Because any card made with a piece of foil treated to the Faux Pressed Metal technique is verrrry fragile, I made every attempt possible to protect that portion of the card.

The serene Canada Goose is from a retired set (boo hoo!), but it is perfect for a masculine card, so I put the goose to work once again. Initially I stamped the goose and weeds in Night of Navy. Since my ink pad is old and not re-inked (I don't own the reinker), I did not get a very dark impression. 

Sometimes I have more luck making an ink look darker with this technique:

To emboss in any color, first ink up your stamp of choice in VersaMark Ink, then with the color you'd like your embossing to be. Cover the inked image with clear embossing powder, and heat to emboss as usual. 

I fussy cut the image. Before I cut it out, the flat empty cardstock surrounding the image was ugly and took over the entire card. 

The following image shows a little of the dimensional layers of the card. I will show you more with explanations later on in the post.

To allow the Faux Pressed Metal background to remain the star of the card, but yet to not overwhelm it, I carefully mounted it behind a Night of Navy frame that I die cut. Another strip of the navy cardstock spans the distance across the card, close to the bottom. I sifted through my scraps of old Designer Series Paper that would work well with my card. I came across this masculine stripe that was perfect. Besides that, it introduced another color that I could utilize in my card. This was Always Artichoke -- a lovely complement to the Night of Navy. That color became my card base.

Besides using Stampin' Dimensionals, the real lifesaver of this card were the strips of Foam Adhesive (found on page 203 of the annual catalog). Having had these purchased for some time, I'd never used them. They worked so well to neatly mount the cardstock frame up and around the delicate foil. And easy to do!

In the following photos, I am just trying to illustrate the depth and dimension of the card, and that the way I put it together really protected the fragile foil layer. I still don't think a card made with the Faux Pressed Metal technique -- even one as safeguarded as this one -- would travel well through the mail. 

I feel the end result is a very classy, masculine greeting.

Masculine

Smiles.