Having a Crafty Weekend – Fine Frames Circle Die and Embossing

I am having a crafty long weekend, as per this post and this post, and this post, and this post, and this post, and yes, another post, it’s been a really good couple of days so far and I’ve been really enjoying crafting without an agenda.

So remember these from the post above?  I ended up not using the gold frames since I was lacking inspiration at the time so I moved on to another project and change of pace, because I didn’t want to force anything.  Today however, is a different story…

I decided to work with the circle fine frames in gold. Still nothing was coming to me idea-wise, so then I started thinking of other ways to use the die itself, and decided to use it with my embossing mat and see what happened

I embossed the Circle die multiple times on this piece of white card.  You have to be careful with this technique as it can cause the paper to start warping, and if it gets bad, then you might want to run it through the Big Shot, iron it or leave it under something heavy.

You can see here it’s a little wavy but I’m not done with it yet so it’s ok for now

I had this idea of sticking the gold frames on the top mimicking the pattern of the embossing underneath but it still didn’t feel right to me, and the embossing is a little hard to see on the white.

So I decided to colour the card with one of my favourite colours – Galatic Stream.  Better.  Much better, and easier to see, plus also it will go with the gold I think.

I spent a bit of time placing and moving these circles around and not really loving any of them really. I find in these situations, it can be useful to just walk away and do something completely different, then come back to it with fresh eyes.  So that’s what I did.  After I put this aside and did this fringed cactus card, this watercolour stamping, this watercoloured stencilling, and this watercoloured sweet pea set, I circled back around to this set (pun intended lol)

I played around with the circles placement some more, but it still wasn’t working for me, so I decided I would cut out a sentiment and maybe that would help. So I pulled out my Waffle Flower Cutaway Letters die set, last used for this card, and that was when I discovered that I have LOST the N 🙁  As I said, the last time I used it was February and I’ve obviously vacuumed a lot since then, so unless it has miraculously fallen down behind something, then it’s long gone, and now I have a set without an N. I can’t believe this as I am so careful with these little letter dies and keep them all on magnetic sheets, but this one had not been put on a sheet yet as I had only used it once and put it away quickly because of all the hospital visiting at that time and not thinking straight.

So now it’s gone, and will have to have something done about it later, but for now, during my search for the missing die, I came across the die cuts from this card that I didn’t use and had put in my stash.  So I decided to try them on this card, and this is what happened.

This chunkier font has given me a different look altogether from what I was intending – don’t you love it when that happens?  The die cuts are dark navy and look great against the Galactic Stream background and the gold circles. It’s helping me feel less sad about my missing N die.

And here’s the finished card with the overhanging bits cut off. You can’t see the dry embossing very well in this photo but it is there and looks great, and adds extra texture and interest to the card. The alphabet die is the Bold Caps Alphabet die set from Altenew which I’ve had since last year and I use it a lot.

It often pays off to walk away from something that is not working rather than trying to force it, and that’s what happened with this card.  I took a break of several hours, and did something completely different, and then came back to it with fresh eyes and now I have a card that I really love.