Gears Alot Birthday Card

My brother has a birthday coming up and it's always a bit of a challenge to come up with masculine cards -- until I fell in love with the gear 3D embossing folder from Tim Holtz.  My brother loves cars -- and has since he was just a toddler so, I created this gear card for him.

The first step was to emboss the gears on blue card stock sprayed with just a tad bit of water. On my first attempt, I mounted the panel onto tan card stock for the actual card, but it warped horribly when I used matte gel, so I redid it and mounted with sticky tape instead.

Next I rubbed the embossed panel with just a bit of metallic rub on cream that I've had in my stash forever. Loved how this gave it a slight metallic look.

Next step was to add to die cut black gears -- also from Tim Holtz. Though I loved the look, in retrospect I sacrificed readability when I added the Happy Birthday.

I die cut the letters and gave them a metallic rub as well, but they just didn't seem to stand out enough.

So, I lightly dabbed the letters with Broken China Distress Paint. This improved readability but only slightly. I didn't want to start over completely as this needs to get in the mail tomorrow in order to reach him in time!

I'm entering this into the Frilly and Funkie Impress Us Challenge -- it was fun doing this and working with the embossing folder.

http://frillyandfunkie.blogspot.com/2018/10/impress-us.html

I just received a bundle of Christmas dies and stamps -- looking forward to diving into them next week!