Making foiled flower decorations

Do you like the effect of these foil decorations on my greetings card? When you see them in person, they look like they have been foil printed onto the card because they are very smooth. Or perhaps they could even be peel offs. But no, they were much cheaper to make than that.

They started life as a roll of 3m Aluminium tape. The kind you use for DIY. All you need then are some flower punches. I've used my Tonic Studios flower punches here. 

All you need to do is punch out a few flowers and carefully peel off the backing paper- this is a bit fiddly- but worth it. Then apply to your card or scrapbook page smoothing it out carefully. Then use the bottom of a glass and rub in circular motion over the flower to burnish it to your page- this removes any catchy bits. For the finishing touch use a sharpish pencil and draw in lines and designs however you want the flower to look. I think the finished result is very satisfying.

For this one I used one of my Petal Pairs punches and a heart punch to make a leaf shape.

Believe me, you can get a whole lot of flowers out of one roll of tape. And you can use so many different punch shapes with this technique. Just try to keep to ones that are not too fiddly. 
Have fun, and let me know if you try this. 

Wedding Stationery Sample

I have been doing some sample wedding invitations for a friend who gets married next June. Here is the design I like the best so far. (Of course the choice won't actually be mine.)

I seem to always lean towards clean designs when it comes to Wedding Invitations. 


Anyhoo, The front design is very simple. I printed the text with a font from here. For the little motif,  I used the crossing hearts paper punch from Tonic Studios.


For the inside I wanted to make slits to slide in the silver insert rather than just sticking it down, so I rummaged through my punches to see what I could think of and came up with this idea. I used this two in one paper punch

I removed the corner punching guides and simply lined up the punch with the edges of the card. To get the right size for the insert, I measured between the top and bottom points, and the outermost points and made the card just a fraction smaller. 

Because I used a contrasting colour insert I think it looks pretty from the back too. 
(I imagine it might be possible to do this with other corner punches that have a removable guide.)

I am thinking I could also use this idea for making small cards for inserting store gift tokens.