Birthday Surprise

The card closes with ribbon.

This Six Panel Folio Book Card inspired by Mixed Up Craft, is a birthday card commission I did for a neighbor. 

I used silver metallic card stock as the base, and alternately added red and white card stock on top. To make this card as simple as possible, I decorated the card base with small panels of silver, and topped these, again alternately, with red and white card stock to be written on. I then made tiny "bouquets" of small red and white roses and glued them on with hot-glue.

The front of the card was decorated with a small post card from the "Miss Margit - In the Garden Collection" from REPRINT, as well as another small bouquet of roses. Silver Nuvo Drops add the final touch.

The inside of the card with the box lying in front.

The only thing that shows that this is a birthday card is a small panel with a silver heat embossed "Happy Birthday" in Norwegian.

The same silver metallic card stock is used as the connection between the individual panels.

The card is rather thick when it is rolled together, and I had to make a fairly deep box to hold it. It is decorated in the same style as the card, with silver and red, and I have used the same postcard from REPRINT to decorate the closure flap of the box, as on the first panel of the card. The roses that I have added on the front, are a little bit bigger than the ones inside the card.

Folio Book Card 

Embossing on vellum

I was not happy with my hot air, or heat gun, so I decided to invest in a new and more powerful one. I talked it over with my better half and he recommended buying an industrial brand that he has lots of experience using in his job. SO I did just that, and ended up buying a Steinel HL1920E. It has an output of 2000W compared to my old craft one that has only 300W. It also has a manual step-less variable temperature of 80-600 degrees Celsius! I was eagerly waiting for its arrival, but at the same time I was really worried that it would scorch my paper.

My new heat gun.

So when it had arrived I put it to the test. I did various embossing powders on various types of card stock, and all in all I was really pleased with the result. It gets really nice and hot, so the actual heat embossing goes really quickly. I do however have to make sure that I don't hold it in the same place for too long, as the paper then will turn brown🔥🧯. Oh, and it is really important to be aware of where I place my fingers😰.

I decided to make a card with the top middle one in the picture, the one with the flock of butterflies flying off.

Birthday card with gold tinsel embossing powder.

The gold embossing powder I have used is Gold Tinsel from Ranger, rangerink.com, and it is a fairly coarse embossing powder. This means that it doesn't melt on smoothly, but is rather rough to the touch, a bit like sand paper.

To me the ultimate test of my new heat gun would be to heat emboss on vellum. I haven't tried that much with my old heat gun as I have struggled to get it warm enough, and have ended up getting a really poor result. Therefore I decided to give it a go and make the whole front of a card out of vellum that was heat embossed. It actually came out really nice! The only thing I would have done differently on this card is that I would have put double sided adhesive on the entire piece of vellum, as smaller strips of double sided adhesive shows through the vellum. On this card I was lucky enough to be able to hide the glue strips behind the flowers.

Birthday card with heat embossed vellum front.