Christmas Card Catch Up

Well summer has finally arrived! It was hot and humid today and tomorrow will be even worse with the humidity making it feel close to 100ºF. The A/C will be on and I’ll be down in the lower studio (aka the basement) getting some cards and scrapbooking done. I don’t venture out in that heat unless I have to.

Terrible about the earthquake in the Napa Valley in California. That must have been terrifying.

I’ve been getting behind on making my Christmas cards so today I hunkered down and got four done. The first card was for last week’s challenge at http://merrymondaychristmaschallenge.blogspot.ca but I didn’t get it done in time to enter it.

The challenge was to make a card using black, gold and silver. Well, I ended up skipping the silver part seeing as the card was too late to enter. I ran a piece of white cardstock through an embossing folder and then lightly inked gold ink over the top and mounted it on the white card base. The stamp was embossed in gold on the black panel which was die cut with a Spellbinder’s die. The gold strip along the side is stolid gold but the light made it change colour. The little gold stars, the sentiment and round dots are stickers like Dazzles. The sentiment was glued to a black die cut label and then I glued it to the same gold paper as the as the long strip and cut around it leaving about 1/8” edge.

Then I decided to make a card for this week’s challenge which was to use a wreath.

Lots of layers on this card. The stamp is from Hot Off the Press and is one of their small $1.29 set stamp sets. It is hard to see on the card but first I stamped the wreath, the holly and the word “Joy” in cream on the white cardstock. These were all part of the same stamp set. Then I stamped the wreath in black on that panel plus on another piece of white cardstock. I coloured the second stamped image and cut around it and then glued it over top of the one stamped on the white panel, lining them up so the swirls matched. Red gems were added as berries. The sentiment is a sticker and mounted on a Spellbinder’s die cut label and then I glued it to the green and cut around it leaving about 1/8” edge. The beige and green cardstock was die cut with the Spellbinder’s Card Creator set so I don’t have to measure each one. It needed something else so I added the three large red gems to the left side and three small ones under the sentiment.

 

Then I made another card using the same wreath stamp. Lots of layers on this one too.

This time I stamped it on white cardstock and die cut it with a Spellbinder’s large scallop die and coloured the outside with the same blue Copic. The wreath and the blue part was coloured with alcohol markers. It needed some bling! The berries are red stickles and some green stickles were added to the holly. I wanted the blue layer to match so I ran the same blue Copic marker down the edge of white cardstock and used that as one of the layers. The ribbon was already died with Distress Inks and it happened to match the blue paper so I just tied a bow and glued it on. The sentiment is hidden under the bow a bit but it is easy to see in real life. The card base was in the stash and it matched too. I must have made it for another project but then didn’t use it. Cool!

Wow, three cards in one post. That doesn’t happen often!

Cheers

Violet