Winter Wishes

This is the first Christmas card I've made in 2013 and even though I absolutely love winter time, it does feel a bit odd making Christmas cards in the middle of summer! I'm really happy with this card though- it's a bit different to my usual style...

I started with the beautiful 'Lily of the Valley' topper and worked the rest of my card around it. It's a very simple topper with limited colours so I chose to go for the icy blues & greys colour scheme. I chose 2 matching DCWV papers that both had a hint of glitter and then 3 shades of cardstock from DCWV pastel mat-stack. I also used some Bazzil Bling silver cardstock to mount the topper onto.

I worked exclusively with odd cm sized squares so started by cutting all of my different cardstock. The striped square is cut to 19cm and used to mat the 8x8 base card. The paisley design card is cut to 15cm, plain blue to 11cm and plain grey to 9cm. I edged all of the card pieces with my black promarker to make them stand out from each other. The silver Bazzil Bling mat was cut to 13cm square.

I laid out all of my cardstock pieces onto my base card but I felt that the topper needed some more interest to it so I tried something that I've not done before and after a bit of trial and error, it worked quite well. I used the grand callibur to emboss a swirly snowflake design onto the topper above the penguin image. I then wanted to repeat this at the bottom of the card so I repeated the process. This meant that my original embossing got a bit squashed by the rollers as it went through the second time and lost its definition. Turns out that I needed to leave the bit that I'd already embossed hanging out of the mat so that it didn't squash that bit. I carefully lined up the embossing and tried it again and it thankfully worked pretty well. To add a bit of extra definition to the embossing, I gently edged it with some silver gilding wax using exactly the same method I use for distress inks but on paper rather than my ink blending mat.

I attached all of the layers to my base card and then used 2 different xcut snowflake punches with the darkest blue DCWV cardstock to punch some snowflakes to add as the finishing touch to the card.

This card definitely has more layers than my usual style but I think it's still quite simple thanks to the clean lines of the layers. Embossing onto toppers is definitely something I'll be trying again (now I know how to do it properly!).

I am entering this card into the following challenges:-

Paper Shelter 'punches & dies'

Penny's Paper Crafty Challenges 'dry embossing'

Lili's Little Fairies 'Christmas in August'

Cute Card Thursday 'Die-ing to punch'

Here Come the Boys 'Only Squares'