Season's Greetings in Gold

Our quilt guild meeting was last night. I have not been able to quilt for over a month because of my tennis elbow. I'm just aching to get back in there (no pun intended). So many ideas floating around in my head and I hope they are still there when I get back to it. Trouble is spring is here and the garden and great outdoors call me too. So torn this time of the year of what to do. I did have some strips cut and I sewed them together last week just to see if I could do it and that did not hurt my arm at all. But, I ran out of strips and needed more cut. Cutting out is not good. I couldn't decide which would be worst, trying to cut strips with a very sharp rotary cutter with my left hand or asking hubby to cut them. Neither one won and I covered up the sewing machine and went back to the lower studio to do paper crafting. So glad I'm a multi-crafter!

Once again I decided to make a Christmas card once a week following the sketch on Always Playing with Paper blog. They call it Merry Monday. Here's my card.

The sketch called for strips of paper but I had this 12x12 piece of pretty stripped paper that was calling my name so I used it.  I took some Pine Needles Distress Ink because it was so close in colour to the green in the paper and stroked it a few times over a piece of plastic that I use all the time for inking paper. I misted it with water and ran my fingers thru the ink to make sure I didn't have any ink not wet and to blend it a bit. I took a piece of white cardstock and made sure it was larger then I wanted and dipped it into the ink and dried it with the heat tool. I kept dipping and drying until I got a nice mottled effect that I was after. Then I stamped the greeting with VersaMark and gold embossing powder and heat embossed it. Then I ran it thru the Cuttlebug with the Spellbinders rectangle die. The gold scallop rectangle was cut with their scallop die

. I really had to use a lot of glue and pressure to get the green piece to stick to the gold because it was buckled from the watered down ink. Here's my trick. After glue it down well, I flip it over onto a clean piece of paper and use a clean wooden roller and roll over a few times pressing down quite hard. That is the only thing I use this wooden roller for - I picked it up at a thrift store so I have no idea what brand it is but it works great. Any hard roller would do.

The gold snowflake on the top left was die cut from a Spellbinder Snowflake die set. The one on the lower right was punched out several times and then glued together to make it thicker. I added a gold gem in the centre of them.