Manhattan Rose Birthday Card

I'm not much into stamping anymore, but I still enjoy looking through the SU catalogs for all the other goodies they have to offer. When this Manhattan Flower embossing folder first became available a while ago, I knew I just HAD to have it, but it took me this long to finally decide it was time to play with it! Inked up with SU's Pretty In Pink stamp pad and ran it through my Big Shot on white gold cardstock and really liked the resulting embossed image.

I then cut out the roses and thought it might look neat layered inside a recessed window card. First saw this type of card created by my blogging friend, Michele over at her blog, My Simple Crafts, and just had to try one too. The tutorial for this by Lynn Mercurio is over at Splitcoast. Pretty much an easy card to do, and happily simple to alter, which I had to do since the roses wouldn't fit into the window using the original measurements. Roses were layered onto a piece of cardstock embossed with a Cuttlebug embossing folder from their Asian bundle and added a butterfly cut from SU's Beautiful Wings Embosslit die.

For my frame, I really wanted to use my Martha Stewart double loop edge and corner punches, but got frustrated when I realized it can only do set sizes (duh!), none of which would fit my window. After moping around a bit I finally had an "aha!" moment and decided to cheat a little...I used my punches to punch out the smallest rectangular frame it could create from black cardstock. I then scanned the punched frame, saved it as a .jpg image, and imported into Make the Cut to render into a cutfile. In Make the Cut I simply re-sized my frame to the size I needed to fit my card. If you look closely, you'll see that the cut is no where as precise and clean as an original punched frame, but heck, it was good enough for me!

Here's the inside of the card. For some reason, I really didn't like how the recessed window pops out on the inside of the card so I ended up covering the entire inside right panel of the card with a "box". Used another embossed rose and a couple leaves, punched and run thru a crimper to embellish. Added the sentiments and it was ready for giving to my dear mil on her birthday. Took me a while to put this togther, but had fun and learned so much!