Don’t you just love the soft look of a sponged edge on a piece of cardstock? Well, now you can achieve that same result in digital too.  The following simple steps will take you through the creation process:

1. First create the shape want by opening the Punches tab on the right and finding the shape closest to your desired end result . I started with a basic rectangle by choosing the  1.25” square punch and selecting apply and then close. This gets a square on your page you can manipulate. Since I want a rectangle, I grabbed one of the side handles and dragged it until the rectangle looked right widthwise, then di the same for the height.
2. Now fill your paper with the color you want to sponge with. (I used chocolate chip in my sample here) copy, then paste without offset. with the new copy still selected with the new copy still selected change the color to your Cardstock color (in my case Very vanilla) and right click and select edit. You now want to make this shape very slightly smaller than the first one. Since we started with a duplicate of the first one our numbers in the width and height will show us our starting point. I generally leave proportional checked and just adjust the width down 2 to 3 pixels. (in this sample I started with a width of 330 and a height of 212 and ended up with a width of 327 and a height of 210) click the X in the upper right corner to close when your numbers are where you want.
3. Now we need to make sure the 2 layers are centered on one another, so select all (ctrl+A),  click the align button on your center toolbar and select middle and then center and you are ready to add the next layer.
4. Select the top layer (vanilla) and copy, then paste without offset. with the new copy still selected fill with dsp. (any dsp will work as it is not going to be see- so use whatever comes up first), now click resize and reduce the dsp as small as you can and move it off the white space in the center. Exit this screen.
5. Select the Drop Shadow on the right and adjust the OPACITY  and the BLUR. (I found that 40 % opacity and Full Blur worked well. Before leaving this screen change your shadow color to the same as your sponge color. (chocolate chip for mine)
6. For the next layer I used the Rounded Corner Punch, filled with dsp, resized the dsp and moved it off to side as above and then selected Drop Shadow and adjusted the OPACITY  and BLUR  (For this one I adjusted my opacity to 80% and the Blur to Full) You will also want to change the Shadow color to the color of your cardstock (in my case Very Vanilla).
7. Finally- copy, then paste without offset. Move your final 2 layers ever so slightly so they are centered (the shadowing makes them look off center if you use the centering tool so for this final step – just eyeball it.
8. As a very last step, select all and Group.

If you followed my settings you will end up with a piece like below:

My settings are as follows:

And with the addition of a few stamps and text you can have an embellishment that looks like this: