Christmas 2015 – Christmas Card Making – Lawn Fawn & Penny Black

This is the last of the set of cards I made with my bestie, Yvette. For this one we used some chipboard letters and we adhered them lightly to the card and then used Tim Holtz Peacock Feathers Distress Ink and we rubbed the ink over the top of the letters and in between the cracks to create the “merry” in white with the light blue around. We used the snowflake stamps from the Lawn Fawn Critters in the Arctic stamp set using the Tim Holtz Peacock Feathers Distress Ink, Memento Teal Zeal Ink and a Memento Northern Pine Ink. The Northern Pine is supposed to be a green, but it is so dark it looks like black. So we stamped once on a scrap piece of paper and then stamped on the card for those ones to create a nice grey.  We finished up with the sentiment “warm winter wishes” from the Penny Black Whoooos Wishing Stamp Set.

Christmas 2014 – Christmas Card Making – Basic Grey Evergreen with Ribbons

After a very trying night at work that left me feeling very grumpy. I wanted to relax with some card making while watching some CSI: Miami. Though I quickly found this card almost as frustrating to make as my night at work.

I chose two coordinating papers a gold and a red from the Basic Grey Evergreen 6 x 6 Paper Pack. And I found some red and gold ribbon I had left over from about three Christmases ago.

I had a bit of trouble making this one… I was trying to be quite precise with measurements and have the outer border all the same and was doing really well, I thought, until I adhered the gold pattern paper to the red pattern paper and the gold was the tiniest of tiny bits too short.

Carefully, oh so carefully, I tried to remove the pattern paper – it started to tear. I stopped and looked at the problem and tried to gently come at it from a different angle – I ended up tearing the paper and then the card stock.

…Then I lost my temper at it – I looked at the card and heard the Ironside sirens and saw red like Kiddo from Kill Bill when she sees her target. I then tore the remnants of the card into many little pieces.

After heaving a few heavy breaths, I pulled out another bit of card stock, stared at it menacingly just daring it to act in a manner that would displease me.

One last deep breath and then I remeasured and cut another pair of patterned paper. I was able to successfully adhere the paper together and have it be exact and matching. I breathed a sigh of relief.

The next challenge: adhering the ribbon. I don’t think I’ll make another card like this again…

I’m sure there would have been a better and easier way to make this card but I apparently chose the hard way. I also chose to use super glue…

I adhered a strip of red ribbon under the pattern paper and then the gold strip of ribbon positioned underneath that. Easy to write about… wasn’t easy to do. I ended up making a mess to the right hand side with the glue. Now I had to find a way to cover it up.

I thought, ‘a bow!’

To make the bow I folded one strip of red and super glued the edges together. Then I super glued two strips of the gold ribbon to the back to be the bow’s tails. And then to finish the bow I wrapped another strip of red ribbon over the top of the other ribbons and adhered that to the back. I cut the tips of the gold ribbon bow tails and then adhered the bow to the card to cover the messy glue fiasco I had created.

The result didn’t look too bad!

But it still didn’t look complete. More brainstorming and imaging to think of a way to finish this card…

I really like the ‘Ho ho Ho’ stamp that is in the Penny Black’s Whooo’s Wishing clear stamp pack. I’ve used this stamp to finish off a card I made for my dad and thought it would look nice to finish this card too.

I used some of the yellow pattern paper I had left over from the leaping reindeer card I made for my partner’s grandparents. I cut this into a ribbon shape and then stamped the ‘Ho ho Ho’ sentiment on top in red ink.

Finally I added a triplet of rhinestones to the left-hand side of the sentiment to balance the card and give it a bit more shine.

I’m happy this card is finally finished and that the result is quite pleasing. I finished it with fading light and took two very bad photos. I made this one for my Aunt so hopefully she likes it, though I’m sure you won’t realise my trials in creating it…