Effortless Greetings by Laurie Willison & Spellbinders

Hello friends. For those who celebrate I hope you enjoy this Easter weekend. How are all of you doing? Quarantine is weird. Some days I am fine and some days I find myself really missing my friends. Missing a great meal at my favorite restaurants or even just the simple pleasure of grocery shopping. Everything seems so stressful. But, I am so thankful that I have a craft room where I can escape and make pretty cards to send out. 

Today my friend Laurie Willison has a new line of dies from Spellbinders called Effortless Greetings.  These are made to be use with the Glimmer Machine. The Glimmer Machine allows you to letterpress foil onto your projects. 

For this blue card. I used the Framed Details hot glimmer plate. It has this sweeping branch leaves plate as well as a double rectangle frame (that I will show on other projects below), that I foiled in gold. Then using the same blue cardstock and gold foil, I used the Effortless Sentiment Glimmer "thank you" plate and die. The press foil on your projects really take it to the next level when you are making a classically simple card. 

The glimmer plates do not have to be used alone by themselves. You can incorporate foiling along side stamping. 

The Sweeping Thanks foil plate is 5.5 inches long and around 1.5 inches tall. It can certainly be used alone, but stamping along side the large foiled sentiment added depth, interest and kind of grounded the card better. 

Experimenting with pattern paper and the glimmer plates was fun! I did find that using a larger pattern is better. I tried to make a card using a pattern with small flamingos, and the sentiment got lost and it was really hard to see. 

The Sweeping Grateful Glimmer plate paired with the double rectangle plate, made it look as though the pattern paper came like that, not that it was created by a person. I foiled the sentiment and double rectangle in gold, then using scissors cut it out before adhering it to the card with foam adhesive. 

This was the first time I got to play with the Spellbinders Glimmer Machine and I learned a lot! One tip I can share is that you can layer the foil. Which is awesome because you can mix and match your glimmer plates!

For this card I was able to foil 5 different plates on one project, with 2 foil colors. The sky is the limit with creativity. The Foiled Brushtrokes and Stripes glimmer plate is so versatile. It is what it says it is, you get multiple sized brush stroke and solid lined plates. This allows the user to create backgrounds, borders, trim etc on projects.