Special Day

Hello bloggers!  This one screams wedding or anniversary to me, what do you think?  I just love the Austrian Background so I have used it loads of times in different ways.  For today's card, I covered a piece of coconut white card with a self adhesive sticky sheet and ran it through with the background die.  Since it is a detailed background, it won't cut all the way through with a single pass, which is what you want for this technique (there will be a few areas that do however, so those will need to be taped back into place from the back before removing it from the die).  I removed the die, but added in the oval centre die to cut an opening in the middle.  Using my pokey tool, I removed the areas of the backing paper that would ordinarily be cut completely out, revealing the sticky adhesive sheet.  Once they were all removed, I covered the background with silver polished silk glitter and burnished it into place.  I dusted away any excess with a tissue before removing the remaining bit of the backing paper.  Once removed, it exposed the sticky sheet that was left so I covered it with Iced Snow.  I added mounting foam to the back of it to raise it for dimension.  I stamped my sentiment (from Justrite) using a Clear Perfect Medium pad and heat embossed it with silver shine embossing powder.  I mounted the background over the sentiment so it showed through the centre opening.  I stamped some flowers using the Heartfelt Creations Majestic Morning flowers and cut them out with the matching die.  I layered up several of them for the area under my sentiment and made one to go in the opposite corner.  I seated the flowers on some silver seam binding and used a fancy stick pin that was given to me along with a triple pearl pin that I coloured with silver distress stain.  I cut a few swirls from the Bella Rose die to add around the flowers.  I finished the card with a pierced white mat using my piercing ruler on coconut white card and then a final white mat.  The finished dimensions are 6 1/2" x 8 1/2" in size.

I thought you might also like to see a couple of pictures that were taken on a three day mid week getaway I was on recently.  There was a triple wedding in the family that took place in the Bahamas (it's only an hour flight from Florida) so I flew down for it.  I had a free day before the wedding so decided to go swim with the dolphins!  Well it isn't really swimming with them, but you do get to pose with them in the water so it was quite fun!  The last pic was taken just seconds before our dolphin named Tess splashed me good with her tail!  She was only a year old and her trainer said that she was a bit of a handful!

I have a bit of a special treat today as well because  I have just realised that I have two copies of the Wednesday Card Giveaway as it was used for one of the demos on the Create and Craft USA segments that I filmed!  So we have two winners this week!  Which is also nice as this is the last Wednesday card giveaway of the year too.  We will start it back up in 2015 though so not to worry!  This week's winners are:

Barbara Macaskill!!!

and

Helen Jones!!!

Congratulations!  Please email me at americansue1@gmail.com to confirm your address and claim your prize.  All for now, Sue x