Hello my crafty peeps!  Here it is, my first card project for the Altenew Educator Program Level II.  Not bad for my first one after having the summer off I think.  This class gave us an opportunity to try something new and maybe unexpected  So, I went waaaaaaaay back to my beginning years of paper crafting for this one.  The technique I used is probably something a lot of you young crafters may not have known about.  Which is awesome! Because it's totally under-rated yet seriously a cool effect, as I hope you will see.  I was inspired by the late summer garden colors for this project, I chose different shades of light pinks and greys because the flowers in my garden are starting to pale with the waning of summer here.  I also have been really intrigued lately with the incorporation of geometric, or modern design mixed with traditional or floral designs.  I hope you like this project, please leave me a comment and let me know what you think or drop a pic if you happen to try this technique yourself!

For this project I reached deep into my box of tricks for my old lightbox. 

We used these back in the day before embossing machines.  You would buy metal stencils, affix them to the surface of the light table, place your cardstock over it and, with the lights out lol and various size stylus' you would trace the design from the stencil into the cardstock to emboss the image.  I really love the Altenew Geometric Landscape stencil so I chose to use this to emboss onto my cardstock. I first took a piece of Classic Crest Solar White 80 lb. cardstock and cut it to 5 1/2" x 4 1/4".  I laid the stencil over this and traced a line from the stencil onto to the cardstock.  I wanted this piece to be cut on an angle and raised up on the actual face of the card so I kept turning and playing with the stencil to find the most natural flow of the lines.  I then set up my light box, taped the stencil down, turned off the lights and taped the cardstock over the stencil, matching up my pencil line with the lines of the stencil.  Now here's a pro-old school tip for ya lol:  when "dry embossing" like this, keep a water mister bottle handy.  The cardstock is stiff and the heat from the light table doesn't help and you could easily rip through with your stylus.  Every so often lightly mist the cardstock.  Don't saturate it or you will tear through it.  Just give it a light mist, rub the water into the cardstock and then press your stylus into the shapes of the stencil below, following the lines. 

After I had traced all the geometric shapes I removed the cardstock and cut off the section of the embossing, following the line I had drawn.   Now, I am a little out of practice with the stylus so I did go over the lines a little bit here and there as you can see in the last of the three following photos, so I ended up flipping this piece over and using the de-bossed side which actually looked perfect!  

A twist with a twist lol.  Because this cut-out piece had a lot of angles, I form fitted foam double sided tape onto the back of it.  You don't want the pieces that stick out to get bent or sag on the card face.

Next thing to do was cut and fold a standard A2 size card. I made this base also from the Classic Crest Solar White cardstock.  I wanted very loose, muted flowers in pale shades to cover this background so I chose the Watercolor Wonders stamp set by Altenew as well as Altenew crisp dye inks in Blush, Frosty Pink and Morning Frost. This is a layering stamp set so i simply used the same ink for each layer of the flowers, stacking the colors up on top of themselves to achieve very subtle tones in the flowers. 

I used the same method to stamp out three of the largest flowers as well as leave and fussy cut them out to be embellishments on the card face.

 I played with the layout  before I attached the de-bossed geometric layer to the stamped card face. 

           

I thought I wanted the embellishment flowers and leaves to sprawl up the side of the card.  

After attaching them with double sided foam tape and calling it finished, I changed my mind and took off the higher flowers and placed them all as a cluster instead.

 I really think changing this composition made a huge improvement to the card.  The sentiment is from the Altenew Gardenia Duo stamp set.  I used the Blush and Frosty Pink inks to blend onto a scrap of the Classic Crest Solar White cardstock. I stamped the sentiment onto it using the Morning Frost, then trimmed it up and attached it to the card face.  

I really like how this card came out.  It may not have been the best stamp set to use for fussy cutting due to the free, artistic style of the flower stamps, but I really like the colors and overall composition.  I may try this again with other stamp sets.  I learned a lot from making this card actually, but most importantly, don't be afraid to change it up.  Get out of your comfort zone, flip things around, turn them over, you never know what you actually may like from giving your project a twist!