It may not really be a masterpiece but I worked on it all day…and started it the night before!  Now I shouldn’t admit to my customers that it took me so long to make one card, but since this is for my son’s college graduation it had to be special.  I was thinking of making a hanging tag with “UT” on it from the ribbon, but just as I got it punched out I got the brilliant idea (I thought!) to put the UT in the center of the “graduate medallion”, rather than the G.  That seemed to do it for me as far as design, so then I got the idea to emboss the UT to make it stand out.  First I tried clear on Really Rust letters.  OK, but not great.  Then I tried the Copper Embossing Powder and felt like it was a pretty close match to the color I wanted.  The striped paper on the bottom of the card is from a scrapbooking pack I bought at the UT bookstore on a previous trip.  The stamp set is “Great Grads”.  If you don’t already own this set you might want to get it so you can make a bunch of graduation cards before school is out!

And here is the inside of the card.  The quote is from the stamp set “Live Your Dream” from the Occasions Mini, page 9.  I bought that stamp set just to get this quote for this card.  The star is a stamp from “In the Stars” also from the Occasions Mini, page 5.

Last week I sat down with the “Great Grads” stamp set on page 55 of the SU catalog to see what I could come up with. This is the result!

  Here is the whole group of cards.

This one I stamped the background all over with the multi-word stamp using my Stamp-a-ma-jig to get the stamping lined up right.  The little cap over the “a” is popped up with a Dimensional.  The “G” is layered on a scallop punch with another black scallop behind it for contrast.

This one my demo friend, Anne, embossed the quote with the stamp set in silver, which made something resembling a little plate on the front of the card.  Tying the red ribbon around the side strip seemed to add balance.

For this card I CASEd (copied) a card I saw on Splitcoaststampers made by Nancy Riley.  She used Designer Paper and the jumbo star wheel whereas I stamped the words on the strip, used a smaller star wheel at the bottom and used my white gel pen on the black strips.

This card opens at the top.  Again an embossed quote at the bottom and just the “Graduate” medallion at the top for a very simple look.

And one more, very simple and easy!

Now I just need to make a special one for my son graduating from the University of Texas at Austin!