Whats on Your Workdesk Wednesday

Here we are at another WOYWW and I'm running late today. For anyone who has not discovered what this is about pop over to Julia's blog Stamping Ground and discover a world of work desks - there's nothing like a good snoop around other people's desks and see what they are up to. Saying that, here's mine:

After I finished posting the cards I had made over the last couple of days yesterday I rewarded myself with a session playing with my Cuttlebug. I've had it for a few months now but not done much with it so I really wanted to experiment and I had all the leaves collected recently on the Woodland Walk (see Saturday's post for photos). Confession time: the leaves collected on Saturday had dried to a crisp because I left them too long so I had to nip up to the Woodland Walk and collect some more - a great excuse to get out in the fresh air! Anyway, new leaves collected and you can see the result.

I tried embossing on three types of card, white, gold mirror and a more matte gold card . The embossing showed up best on gold mirror but it doesn't photograph well so no close-ups to show you but you can see them on the left of the photo. It also showed up well on the matte gold:

I discovered that you need leaves with a very well defined texture - holly leaves were the best, with sycamore the next best. Others were very disappointing. Also after the leaves have been through once or twice they loose their texture anyway and have to be tossed. The results on white card were initially disappointing - the embossing was too subtle. However, when I took distressing ink to the card they perked up considerably and the effects were much more usable. For example here is the holly leaf distressed with Tim Holtz's Shabby Shutters.

And a sycamore leaf distress with Adirondack Noel



And leaves that really didn't emboss well but made an interesting card distressed with TH's Weathered Wood.

I think this will make a great tag.

And just because the Cuttlebug was out and I was in the mood I tried a few other embossing projects I had in mind. Here is a piece of lace on the matt gold paper - not perfect but worth trying again with other lace.

This last is a border. I like putting borders on my cards and dressing them up with lace and ribbons, I also love, love, love Swiss dots (there has got to be a name for this condition!) and, though I haven't managed to acquire the Swiss dot embossing folder yet, I do have a border folder. I decided to try to combine the embossed border with my lace punch and here is the result.

Love it - I think this will look great on a card.

That's my desk this morning but before I take off on a trip round everyone else desks I'd like to warmly welcome my new followers - my husband thinks this is hilarious, me with followers! - and thank everyone who left their kind and much appreciated comments since last week - it is all appreciated. I'd also like to say that I did visit all the desks over the week, albeit I didn't get to the last few until yesterday, but I did not, unfortunately, find the time to leave a comment on all. However, please be assured I enjoyed visiting every and each one.

Bye for now
Elizabeth