Sparkly Dragonfly Card

The heat wave here in the east is finally starting to subside! Needless to say, we didn't spend much time outdoors this week. So, I had a little time to make this card. My initial plan for this project was to make a black and white card, but somehow it evolved into this. I embossed the background with my circles Cuttlebug folder. Then I found a white Spellbinders die cut in my stash and stamped the dragonfly. Thanks to my new friend Jo (at http://www.jpodinc.blogspot.com/), I went to Michael's this week where a bottle of Marcasite embossing powder jumped into my basket! Since it followed me home, I decided to emboss the dragonfly with it. It's hard to tell in the pics, but the image ends up having a lot of sparkle to it. Then I added some flourishes in black ink. Because the whole black and white idea wasn't working for me, I added distress inks to the background. I used Broken China, Peeled Paint and Dusty Concord. Then I used my exacto knife to cut around the wings and pop them up for some dimension. My daugter told me it looked like a dragonfly kite, so I added the three ribbons at the bottom. The last touch was to add some Opalite inks around the edge to make it pop a little.

I've had some Opalite pads for a while now, but I never really used them. They're great! They're interference pigment inks and when you open the lid, all the pads look white. But, when you apply the ink to dark paper.....MAGIC happens! It's kind of like having Perfect Pearls in an ink pad. I'll definitely be using these more in the future.

To get a better view of the Marcasite embossing powder, you can watch Jo's video that she made to show off her beautiful Paris themed tags that she made for the tag swap we were both in.

http://http//www.youtube.com/user/jpodinc#p/a/u/0/Vp7hCgHbzJI

She's very talented! Hi Jo!

Happy crafting and stay cool in this summer weather!