If at first you don't succeed....

I have a lovely new frame die to show today. It took my fancy while browsing through a site so I ordered it. Since then I have seen it used on several challenge entries which surprised me as I didn't think it was particularly new, but looking back at the site, I see it is actually a new release, just last month. It is the Anja circle die by Marianne. 

I wanted to try it out straight away so I made a quick Christmas card, using an image from a Marianne decoupage page. I did it in a hurry and made some bad choices so I am not very pleased with the result.

The backing paper is too light so the pretty fame is rather lost against it. Also I used another die from the set to remove the centre, and the resulting aperture is too small for the size of the card and the image is also a 'bit lost'. But I won't waste it. It is usable, so I added some bling with holographic snowflakes, and did a re-think.

I then made a set of three smaller cards with a little step at the front of them. For the first one I covered some white paper with a double sided adhesive sheet. That was another mistake. Even after several passes through my Big shot, the film did not cut perfectly. Also some of the embossing is poorly defined. But I persevered and eventually got it more or less cut. Then I peeled off the protective layer, added a small image to the centre and poured Diamond dust over the frame. This is a glitter made from crushed glass, and it actually cut my hands a little when I was making sure it was all covered. It was a bit chunky and overlapped some of the cut out areas but I didn't think that mattered. I chose a fairly dark background from my snippets box to show off the frame, and added a strip of paper snowflakes and some silver peel-off flakes and a sentiment.

That left me with the die cut backing paper I had peeled from the adhesive sheet and I thought, "Why not use that as well?" So I painted it with diluted PVA glue and covered it with Glamour dust. I much prefer this to the previous one. I also cut the image with the next size up circle die, and I think that looks better too. I went for a strong contrast this time. There is a little brown in the image so I tried using a brown paper off-cut that I think was printed from a Crafter's Companion CD, and I used gold embellishments and sentiment.

For my final attempt I cut the frame using some silver starburst card. This looks rather 'gun-metal grey' in the photo but it is actually quite sparkly and pretty.

The backing paper is from one of those CD's that sometimes come with a craft magazine. This time I hand cut the image around the outside of the circle die, making it even bigger, and I think it works, and it doesn't cover enough of the frame to spoil it. A few tiny, silver peel-off snowflakes and a sentiment finished this one.

So I have made four more cards and learned a few lessons on the way. I can see me using this frame on birthday cards with just a spray of flowers across it, or something like that. I still think it is really pretty anyway.

As I used several snippets for my backgrounds, I will link this over at Pixie's Snippets Playground.