Birthday card featuring a stamped background, ribbon and a leafy frame for my font greeting

 Another March family card!!  I started with a large black card which fit in an envelope from my stash.  I started my background with a colour printed digital from Morgue File.  I "discovered" a stash of stamps which have not been used and one of them is a Paper Artsy set with trees, eggs, leaves and a word stamp.  It was great to find this stash so I decided to use the tree stamp on this background.  I stamped it several times with red ink on by printed page.  I added over that an all over stamping in brown of the leaves from that set.  Once dry, I trimmed it to size, added a black grosgrain ribbon across the middle and mounted it to my card front.  I chose the greeting from my stash - laser printed font - and decided to use this gold parchment like paper to frame it.  I cut it to size, stamped leaves (Sugarloaf) on the two corners and gold embossed them.  I cut around the edges of my leaves with my exacto knif to allow the greeting to be tucked under.  I found an embossing folder that had the perfect sized frame for my greeting so I used my stylus to emboss it from the debossed side of the folder.  The paper split on the vertical lines a little but was good on the horizontal lines so that must be the way the fibers were lined up in production.  Not too serious!!  I wanted to add a bit of texture to the rest of my paper so I used a script embossing folder under my paper and rubbed some clear wax on the areas around the greeting and the leaves.  I then heated the paper melting the wax and leaving a subtle texture.  I will be experimenting more with that technique.  I mounted my greeting in the middle of the embossed frame and thought I wanted to finish the outside edges with "something" but was being cautious because of the trouble I had earlier with embossing.  I decided to burn the edges!!  Have not done that in quite a while.  Remember doing that quite a bit in my early stamping years.  I used two gold brads to attach this focal element to my card front.  It was fun to use a new stamp set and some try some "old" techniques.  Therese