Year of Rooster!!

Happy Chinese New Year!!

2017 is the year of the Rooster! I was born in the year of the Rat, and it seems that rats needs to be a bit cautious in 2017 in terms of taking risks, its not a good year for me to be adventurous it seems. While I am not of Chinese decent, nor do I follow the Chinese Zodiac calendar, I am however intrigued to find out each year which animal it is and whether its going to be a prosperous year for me and my family. I was pleased find out that it is the year of the Rooster, not because its particularly a prosperous year for me. But because Stampin Up have brought out the Hey Chick stamp set. Coincidence? I think not, I think it was quite intentional. I didn't quite connect the dots at first when the Sale-A-Bration Promotional as part of the Occasions Catalogue items were first introduced, but now it makes sense. And the great thing about it is that you can have this item for free when you spend $90 or more. Feel free to contact me if you want to know more.

So anyway, recently my family and I spent a beautiful day in the City to take part in the Chinese New Year celebrations. It was a really good day with the kids, trying out various Hokka style food, from a variety of Chinese regions, did some shopping from the street stalls, saw the traditional Lion Dance and enjoy several cultural performances. While enjoying a family day out, surrounded by a lot of colourful inspirations, I remember making a mental note to myself to make a Chinese New Year card using the hey chick stamp set. Well, we are now few weeks into the new year already, and I finally got around to making that card, so here is what I came up with. As the saying goes 'its better late than never' or so they say...

               

I choose the Real Red and gold (not a SU paper as I did not have any in stock, had to improvise with what I already had at hand. I think the SU Gold Foil paper would have looked better in this card). The I chose Red and Gold for this card as it is the traditional Chinese New Year colours. I decided to emboss the image with gold embossing powder to make it pop out a bit more and to give it a more luxurious and prosperous feel. Gold is a sign of prosperity and wealth, not just in Chinese culture but for most of Asian cultures. More GOLD, more wealth, more power!
Once I embossed the images of the roosters and coloured them in with various colour markers, I used Layering Ovals to cut out the images. Placing the image on a red background just didn't seem enough, didn't quite have the oriental vibe. So I decided to gold emboss the background using the Avent Garden stamp set, which by the way is another Sale-A-Bration promotional item, meaning this is also a free item. The flower that I chose from this set looks a bit like a lotus flower to me, not sure whether it actually is or not. Embossed background with these lotus images gave it the oriental feel that I was looking for. To finish it off I printed out a simple Chinese New Year greeting, punched it out with the Classic Label Punch and tied it all together with a gold ribbon for the first card (another Sale-A-Bration item) and the second card with a gold twine, to keep with the Gold theme. I felt very pleased that it all came together nicely for me, and I was able to produce a card which my Asian friends would be very happy to receive.

Thank you for visiting my blog, I hope you are enjoying looking through all my creations. Hope you can stop by again really soon. I would love to hear your thoughts, so please leave a comment or two.