Another Christmas Card

Rain, rain, rain. There is a 90% chance of rain today and 80% tomorrow. No hikes this weekend! Joe saw the hummingbird yesterday morning but we have not seen him since. I think he's on his way south. This morning we had our usual supply of sparrows, gold finches and blue jays and then one Kinglet showed up. Cool!

Yesterday I had a question about gamsol which I replied to on the comments then realized that the person asking the question would not likely go back there. Duh! So, I'm answering it again here. Gamsol is a odourless mineral spirit. Think turpentine without the smell! Pencil crayons have a lot of wax in them, especially good quality artists ones like Prismacolor, and the gamsol will melt the wax and blend the colours. It's a very cool process. You can keep adding different colours and blending until you get the effect you want. You blend with tightly woven stumps you buy in different sizes. Not sure exactly what they are called but they are readily available in craft stores.
Gamsol will also melt regular pencil crayons like Laurentian but the colours are not as rich as there is less wax in them. Check out YouTube if you want demos.

Today I'm posting another Christmas card. Christmas will be here before we know it and this year I'm ready. No making all the Christmas cards in a rush this year for me.

Pretty straightforward card to make. Lots of layers. I actually used a sketch for this one but I have no idea where it came from. The top and bottom papers were double sided papers so I just cut them and turned one around and then added the ribbon where they met. The dots are part of the ribbon too and they look like pearls. The sentiment came from a stamp set I bought from Paper Wishes - who no longer ship free to Canada. Too bad. I had an order all ready to go until I realized it was almost $20 in shipping - cancel! (big pout) Anyway, back to the card. I took some cream paper, cut to size, and mounted it on the same wine colour as the ribbon. I wanted to use that wine coloured poinsettia shiny sticker but it looked too stark on plain white cardstock so I took a small snowflake stamp and stamped light blue snowflakes all over it first. I really liked what a difference that made. The edges of the white rectangle was also brushed with the blue ink pad.

If you are stamping your own background, make sure you stamp some images going off the page. I like to start in one area and stamp in a triangle.  By stamping off the paper with only a bit of the image showing, it looks like you used a large piece of paper cut to size. It seems to look better that way - for me anyway.