Today's post dedicated to Liz in Prescott - late happy birthday! And 2 "hanging" birthday cards

First I want to dedicate today's post to a fellow AZ stamper, Liz in Prescott, whose birthday was July 8th!  Even though I haven't met her in person, I think we have quite a bit in common, and I wanted to wish her a belated long-distance Happy Birthday....I am new to that blog and glad she posted to it and I actually read it.  Isn't it a cool thing when you "find" someone online in a blog or something, and you just feel a connection?

It was a coincidence too, that the night before I made up these two birthday cards, combining new and retired Stampin Up products, and some non-Stampin Up items, since I am still in the midst of a major initial organization of my craft room - and one of the cards was a belated birthday card for a nephew (July 17th). So I can share it here with Liz too & hope they bring a smile to her.  I used some of that chocolate scented embossing powder on both cards, quite a lot in fact!  I think it all affected my scent detectors, because after working on these cards for a couple hours, I couldn't smell a thing...So before I put them in their mailing envelopes, I did a little bubble wrap on them, since with the other chocolate card I mailed earlier this month, the person said he could smell it!  Speaking of the envelopes, did you notice that these cards are somewhat different from other cards?  They don't fold in half, and I cut them that way so that they would fit into these elegant envelopes that were lined with red, gold, or silver foil - at Dollar Tree!  I love that store....I didn't want to save them just for Christmas, so designed a card to put in them, and then made the cards so that you could hang them up too - to get that chocolate smell whenever you needed a chocolate fix LOL.

Here is a picture of the gold lined envelope with the sock monkey card - because the foil inside the envelopes is shiny, it didn't scan on my computer very well:

But the red foil envelope scanned much better:

Another thing I learned about the chocolate scented embossing powder is that the smell is stronger if you don't color it with anything else, and/or you use an image that has more area to emboss - like the birthday cake on these cards.  Here is a closeup of the monkey card so you can see I used my CropADile to put 2 eyelets at the top for the fuzzy ribbon to go through:

Sock monkeys are so cute!  I distressed the edges of the gold and white cardstock - the present and cake are chocolate embossed on the monkey card. On the truck card, I chocolate embossed everything except the words, since I don't have the hang of embossing words yet so they are legible. Here is a closeup of the truck card - don't look too close at the messy "ground" - I kinda messed it up! That's another thing I just learned about embossing; every little thing shows up, whether you want it to or not....

I wrote a note on the back of the cards, instead of inside, since there was no inside.  I also found a way to make the scented embossing powder with sugar-free powdered drink mix - this was easily "googled" (scented stamping, or scratch and sniff) and it said only to use the sugar-free, because heating sugar will cause it to brown and you most likely don't want that on your item. I probably would have found out the hard way! Here is the recipe for it:

Mix 1 part sugar-free drink mix to 1 and 1/2 parts clear embossing powder;

Stamp a bold image in VersaMark or a craft ink pad on your card stock;

Then heat emboss the image using the scented embossing powder, just as with any other heat-embossing project.

Gee, now I find out that a "bold" image stamp is recommended - see, I told you I usually find out stuff the hard way....grrr. If you want a super good tutorial with illustrations and measurements for the Scratch and Sniff technique, Beate Johns has one here:  http://www.splitcoaststampers.com/resources/tutorials/scratch_and_sniff_technique

Hope the people like their chocolate cards, maybe you might try it yourself, and that Liz enjoys this post!!