World Card Making Day is usually a good time to get started on holiday cards and I did just that this weekend, how about you? One of my very favorite songs of the season is The Twelve Days of Christmas and when I saw this new curly Kissable Tree by Kim Hughes, along with her sweet birds in the Cute Curls set, this is immediately where my mind went!
I started by stamping the Kissable Tree with Ranger's Perfect Medium onto Memory Box Frost patterned paper and then lightly brushed the stamped image with Bronze Perfect Pearls (metallic pigment powder). I like how the pattern of the paper still shows thru the pigment powder and the blotchy look I achieved. But I did have a difficult time getting a good photo of the subtle sparkle this powder has -- it's really much lighter and prettier in person (there's a closeup photo down below). I cut out the tree and adhered it with dimensional foam tape to the card base (more Memory Box Frost paper layered onto 5.50" square Memory Box solid Mocha cardstock).
Next, I stamped and cut out one of the birds from Cute Curls with Memento Tuxedo Black ink and colored her with BG10 & BG72 Copic markers. Karen Lockhart's IB Pear and a portion of Pears were stamped, cut out and colored with G40, G21, BG93 & E25 Copic markers, with Olive Spica glitter pen on the leaves. These were adhered with dimensional foam tape to the tree.
Let me show you one of my favorite tricks with the Long Scalloped Rectangle Nestabilities . . . I do this quite often, to make scalloped strips to go across my cards and 6-inch scrapbook pages. To cut just one edge of your paper or cardstock with the die, place the part of the paper you don't want cut on the "outside" of the die (the flat side that doesn't have the cutting blade -- here, I'm making my cutting sandwich upside down, with the blade of the die lying flat on my paper and against the cutting mat). Cut/emboss and repeat with the other side. Now you have a strip any width you'd like -- you are not limited to the shapes & sizes of the dies!
After machine stitching the snowflake strip to my card base, I added Star Dust Stickles to the snowflakes in the patterned paper strip along with a Water Dew Drop to the center of one snowflake. Some more Water Dew Drops were added to the rounded top corners of the card.
I made my 'On the first day of Christmas . . .' sentiment with a Dymo label maker and their clear 3/8" tape, adhered it to more of the patterned paper I used for the tree and mounted the strips with dimensional foam tape to the snowflake strip.
Okay, that's one of my holiday cards done . . . now only about 74 more to go, LOL! Have you started yet?