Wise Men

I realized several things when making this card:

1. When embossing with silver on dark card stock, there is almost certainly going to be a fine dust wherever embossing powder has been. This may or may not be an advantage. My husband pointed out that the "dust" on my first card would be nice where the sky was, adding to the starry sky look, but shouldn't be where the wise men were. Could I fix that? So, when pouring the powder, I tilted the card "upside down" to pour on the powder making sure to start no higher up than the very edge of the scripture reference, and it worked nicely (though you can't see it with a scan).

2. I stamped the wise men with versafine, right over the embossed scripture. Stamping it first, no matter what ink I had tried before, resulted in embossing dust covering wise men. If you try this, note that the ink will appear to not be covering the embossed image, but the ink will be there nonetheless, and it will not dry, as I found to my dismay. I had been so careful that the white underside of the two-sided cardstock not touch anything on my counter, but at some point I had several of the cards on top of each other ... where they happily removed the "invisible" black stazon on the scripture of the card below. I was not having one of my "brighter" moments, and I could not figure out what had happened when I went to fold the cards later on. (Embossing this cardstock temporarily warped it, so the cards were spread out to "flatten" again.)

3. A little chalk on the edges of the wise men and camel (if you look closely you can just make it out) give the sense of the light of the star lighting on them. It doesn't need to be super precise to the outline, and can easily be smudged in if too much chalk has been applied.