Unity Stamp Co. / OWH Blog Skip

Hello everyone.. I'm so excited to be skipping along in today's Unity Stamp Company event with Operation Write Home! If you would like to start at the beginning and see all of today's beautiful creations, you can do that over at the Stars & Stamps blog.

If you came here from Lee Mae's blog, you are hopping along in the correct direction! Hooray!

I'll keep it short and share this Any Hero card that I made with my Unity Stamps!

My inspiration comes from a project that I did many years ago. When A.J's dad came home from Operation Desert Storm and finished his service with the Marines, he showed me a collection of dog tags that he was keeping in a cardboard box. It included his own tags, his uncle's tags from Vietnam, his fathers' tags from the Navy and even a set from his grandfather's service in WWII. What a treasure... I had fun trying to create a shadowbox with them.

Here is my "shadowbox" inspired card:

Here's how:

• I cut three papers - two wood grain pattern papers at 4.25 x 5.5" and one red at 4 x 5.25"
• I used one of the wood grain papers as a base and mounted the red layer on top of this.
• I used an oval die to cut the "window" out of the other wood grain paper.
• Using the frame, I centered  it onto the red cardstock and traced a light line so that I would know exactly where to stamp the tags.
• I stamped the tags onto the red paper using VersaMark and some silver embossing powder.
• I stamped the tags with VersaMark again onto some grey paper and embossed with clear embossing powder. I fussy-cut these and added them over the copy on the red paper.
• I embossed the top "frame" paper using an embossing folder by SU and gave it a little extra dimension by distressing lightly with some chocolate colored ink.
• Finally, I mounted the frame to the top, using "The Precious" dimensional tape to give it the shadow box feel. I added the ribbon last, because it just seemed to need something more.

I think that the wood grain paper gave this card a nice masculine feel, and I hope that one of our heroes enjoys this card! I'll leave you with a little close-up so that you can see the dimension better.

Much gratitude goes to Unity Stamp Co. and to OWH for allowing me to participate in the skip this week, it's always so much fun! Thanks for stopping by!

Now hop along over to Ronni's Spot and see what she has for you next!