A Golden Birthday

I've mentioned before that my family celebrates your golden birthday.  This is the birthday where your age matches the day of the month you were born.  My son, Tim, approached me to make a card for his good friend, Jessica, as she was celebrating her golden birthday.  His actual request was to have me help him make a card.  I guess I was too enthusiastic, because I made this with little help from the man.

Here's the details:

• The flowers are stamped using my Heartfelt Creations Arianna Blooms.  The gold is embossing powder and the white is white ink.  Both are stamped onto vellum and die cut using the matching dies.  
• The butterfly is made the same with my Prickly Pear Mini-Butterflies stamp and die set.     
• The leaf was die cut using my Heartfelt Creations Classic Leaf die which I then pressed into my embossing ink pad and heat embossed several layers of gold embossing powder.  I did this by sprinkling the first layer on the wet embossing ink and then heated to melt the powder.  While the powder was still wet, I pressed the image into the leftover powder on my workbench.  Powder clings to the hot image and I heated it up again.  There is probably 4 layers of embossing powder on this image.  The image tends to get very warm, so do this carefully!
• I gold embossed the swirl pattern onto the kraft paper that I had applied white ink to with a dauber.  I first inked through a stencil, but the shape was all wrong so I just kept rubbing the image, smearing the color until it became nondescript.  I also embossed the swirl 2 or 3 times to make the image more shiny and thicker.
• The edges of the kraft paper were embossed by rubbing the edge on my embossing ink pad and sprinkling with gold embossing powder.  I repeated this layer 3 or 4 times and am really pleased with the final look.
• The sentiment was printed out using my computer and printer at home.

I stamped and embossed more gold on the inside.  After my son shyly grinned when I showed him the card, he produced two boxes and asked me to wrap his gifts to Jessica as well.  What is a mom to do?  Certainly the days of asking for my help are limited, so I wrapped them up with some more shiny gold ribbon.  Needless to say, I receive a smiling thank you as he whisked them away, rushing out the door to go to dinner to celebrate.

I'm going to enter this card in the following challenges:

Inspiration Journal's Spring Blooms, what's more spring that butterflies and flowers?

Simon Says Stamp's Wednesday Challenge: Simon Says Anything Goes

and Word Art Wednesday's Challenge #176 Anything Goes