When one becomes two.....

Don't worry, I'm not about to announce divorce or anything drastic like that! Just to show how I turned one rather disappointing card into two I am much happier with.

I love Autumn, it's my favourite season. The colours, the smell of the fallen leaves, the chestnuts to collect, the warming winter vegetables that come into season then, making soups and stews, the clean, sharp tang to the air on a bright frosty morning...... and back to the colours, my favourite colours to wear, to decorate my home with and of course to craft with.

So I was delighted to see that it's a Word Week at Just Us Girls and the word is Autumn.


Now you may have noticed that over the last few days I've been rediscovering old stash - and among the stash was an unopened pack of shrink plastic. So I had to get it out and have a play - I stamped the maple leaves using Stazon ink and then shrank them with my heat gun (tip - if they aren't completely flat after shrinking, put an acrylic block on top of them while they cool to flatten them). I stamped the falling leaf design - an old Rubber Stampede design - and coloured it with Promarkers, then cut it out, and the embossed panel is made with a Darice folder and sponged randomly with colours from a Kaleidascope Autumn Leaves pad, swooshing the sponge very lightly over the surface of the card to give just a hint of colour.

However when I assembled the card with all the separate elements on it, I wasn't happy with it, not happy at all - although I liked all the parts, they just didn't seem to come together the way they had done in my imagination.  Actually I think it looks a lot better in the photo tan  in real life.

So I took the whole thing apart and made it into two smaller cards. For the first, I used the embossed panel to cover the whole front of an A6 card. Then I used the maple leaf stamp again  but this time instead of shrinking it, I embossed it with two different embossing powders, also from my Very Old Stuff - a Verdigris one and the red/brown/olive green one which is called Tiger (I've never seen a tiger those colours).  I added these to the card front with Pinflair glue to give them the slight curl of falling leaves,

Then I took the leaf topper and added it to a plain cream card, edged lightly with brown and stamped with a birthday sentiment. Some of the shrink plastic leaves as embellishment completed the CAS version of my autumnal card.