Thursday 31 May 2012

Christmas Cards Started

Well I finally did it - got my Christmas cards started early.  It was good to have the the Christmas Card Challenge at Waltzing Mouse Stamps to spur me on - okay I'm a little bit behind (five months) but I intend working very hard in the next few weeks to catch up.
These cards were for the February Challenge - we were given a set of photos from which to draw inspiration.   My design was inspired by the photo of a Sock vase pictured on the right.  I loved the bright vibrant colours teamed with the traditional red and white.  I never would have thought of using these colours without the challenge, but I really did enjoy making these cards.  For a start I got to use some papers which I had in my stash and which I thought I'd never be able to use for cardmaking - all I did was overstamp some sentiments with bright green ink to tie in with the green ornament.  Secondly if you're going to make Christmas cards in Spring these are great colours to use, in fact the purple and green cards and envelopes were part of a set I bought from Zeeman earlier this year for Spring.  Finally I actually made an early start on Christmas cards.
As soon as I saw the photo, my new twiggy tree die from Memory Box sprang to mind.  Initially I tried to cut them from some red glitter card, but this proved too tough a job for the dainty die so instead I cut it from red card, coated it with Versamark, and embossed it with some red glitter embossing powder (something else I've had in my stash for years). The small baubles were stamped in various colours on various card scraps with a small snow flake stamp (from the Vintage Ornaments set from Waltzing Mouse), which was then embossed using a sparkly embossing powder and cut using the smallest of the Spellbinders Snowflakes.  A bit of bling just set them off beautifully.  The Ornament was stamped from the largest of the WMS Vintage Ornaments and cut using one of the Spellbinders Heirloom Ornament 2010 dies.  I just love how these stamps work so well with the Spellbinders dies.  Incidentally, that oval shape in the ornament matches that of the Classic Ovals from Spellbinders.