Fancy Pants Cards

I'm not feeling very fancy today; I'm back from the stamping retreat and slept 15 hours last night after coming down with a cold on Friday! My stamping sisters got to see me at my worst, blowing my nose like a foghorn and sick as a dog all weekend. Everytime we have a retreat, my stomach muscles get a serious workout from laughing so hard at the craziness that happens when we all get together in person. These 2 cards are dedicated to all of my stamping sisters today: thank you for making me laugh and for sharing your creativity EVERY DAY. You make my life richer.

I made these cards the first day of the retreat. We made an Archivers stop on the way to the retreat, and I fell in love with some Making Memories epoxy flowers that I saw on clearance. I decided that instead of buying the epoxy flowers, I could make my own, so that I could coordinate the flower patterns with my patterned paper. So bought an EK success flower punch and punched out a bunch of little flowers from patterned paper. Then I took versamark, coated the paper with it, and put clear embossing powder over the top of it and heated it up to create an epoxy-like, shiny texture over the flowers. It worked better for me to give the flowers 2 coats of the embossing powder, because the 2nd coat made the flowers a bit smoother. You could also coat them with diamond glaze or crystal effects, but I found that the embossing powder gave a smoother finish.

The patterned floral paper is by Fancy Pants, Aged Floral "Honeybunch" pattern. The stamp set is by Stampin Up, "True Friend". The embossed swirl is by Autumn Leaves, Swirls Version 2.

I tend to pick out polka dots and stripes to coordinate with my patterned papers, polka dots seem to go with everything!