Project Parade Shadow Box

Hey Everyone! Happy Friday! The October Project Parade is going on right now, and the Verve Divas are really cranking out some incredible projects. It's an easy one this month, so if you have some time this weekend, be sure to play along! This month's focus is on embossing, so that's where I started with my card for today. My color combo came from this week's SCS color challenge {CC188}.

I don't heat emboss very often, mainly because I'm a perfectionist and even the tiniest little fleck out of place drives me batty. But I finally invested in a new Embossing Buddy, since mine was bought at a stamp convention over 10 years ago and had lost most of it's magic dust, so I needed to test it out. I embossed the cupcake from Cupcake Affair in detail black and then colored with a mixture of Pink Pirouette reinker, Crystal Effects and glitter. Well, there were still a few stray specks that ended up embossed on my paper, so I decided to cut out the cupcake. Since it was so sparkly after painting it with the mixture, I thought it would be cool if I could somehow suspend it partially on my card. So I decided to make a shadowbox card, with the intent of just placing the cupcake on pop dots on the back layer.

For the shadowbox part, I took a 4.25 x 5.5" piece of pink pirouette and white cardstock and scored each piece at 1/2" and 1" from either end. Next I cut a circle in the center of the pink piece with a Nestabilities Classic Circle and then cut a smaller circle out of black cardstock and used the negative to frame the inside of the pink circle. I randomly stamped the snowflakes from Winter Wonder in Pink Pirouette and then embossed with Iridescent Ice for a sparkly look. Next I folded along the lines of both scored pieces and then took a 5.5" x 3" strip of acetate and used sticky strip to adhere it to the two outer edges of the white piece. I then layered the pink piece over the top and secured just on the outer edges with sticky strip to form my shadow box. Next I laid everything flat and adhered my cupcake with pop dots to the center of the acetate still showing through the hole in the shadowbox.

Then, all I had left was adding some fun embellishments. I tied a bow with this yummy swiss dot American Crafts ribbon and secured both the bow and the tails with Crystal Effects so that the ribbon would stay in place just so. I added three little pink primas, with mini brads through the center and then added stardust stickles to make the flowers look all wintery. I finished off with some Petal Pink Liquid Pearls accents and 6 sparkly faux brads I made the night before. They're just 1/4" hole punches that I ran through my Xyron create-a-sticker machine to make one side sticky and make them easy to hold in place. Then I covered each hole with Black Diamond Stickles and allowed to dry overnight. This morning I just lifted them off the sticky sheet and put them on the card.