Homespun Christmas

Hey there! How have you been? It's been a couple of busy days for me at work but I found a little time today to create.

In my last blog post, I had entered a card challenge over at Pals Paper Arts. I found it to be a very motivating and creativity-stirring activity. Though my card was not chosen for one of the three card picks, I'm not lamenting. I was thoroughly delighted with the card I created and I received some lovely comments on it.

Today, I'm trying another challenge from Mojo Monday. This challenge presented a tall and skinny card sketch.

I have always been drawn to non-standard sized cards but this one had me envisioning it flipped on its side. That's the beauty of a sketch . . . you can play with it, rotate it, flip it, move things around, substitute things . . .

My thoughts for this card turned to that of an old, country Christmas, one that included plenty of simple, home made decorations.

I chose a card size of 6 x 3 1/2" and created my card base using Kraft card stock. I trimmed the bottom of the card front by 3/4" so that I could display a colorful strip of paper adhered to the inside. I used a piece of paper from the Trim The Tree Designer Pack that reminded me of a cozy quilt.

I cut a Kraft matte for the front, equal in size to the trimmed card front. To this I adhered another piece of that designer paper, this one trimmed so that 3/8" of Kraft was still showing.

Keeping with the country theme, I attached a strip of the Burlap Ribbon and on top of that I ran a strip of the now retired Cherry Cobbler Core'dinations card stock. I embossed it with the Perfect Polka Dots Embossing Folder and then sanded the dots.

I created three, 3D trees to place on this strip. To do this I used the tree framelit from the Snowflake Card Thinlits Dies. Keeping to the country theme, for each 3D tree, I cut four trees from a gingham paper. I trimmed the trunk from all the trees and then vertically scored three of the four trees in each tree set.

I put Tombow glue on one half of a tree and adhered another tree half to it. This was repeated until only the non-scored tree remained. It was glued to the two remaining halves to serve as the tree base. A glue dot was used to adhere a gold foil star to the tree top. The stars were cut with a punch from the now retired Merry Minis Punch Pack. The trees were popped up with Dimensionals on the strip.

I used three burlap fibers to tie in a bow around the entire matte. I got the fibers by cutting off the bound edge of a length of the ribbon and then extracted some burlap strands. The matte was then mounted on the card front.

To complete the card, Christmas Wishes from the Ornamental Pine stamp set was stamped in Cherry Cobbler on the Kraft strip not covered by designer paper.

What do you think? Does this remind you of a country Christmas? Leave me a comment below!

Built for Free Using: My Stampin Blog

Seeing Stars

Another late night crafting session for me yesterday with not a lot to show for it. I played with a number of techniques but was not overly satisfied with my results. However, I did get an idea for the card that I'm sharing with you today, just before climbing into bed at 2:30 a.m!

My original conception of this was to be Gold with Mossy Meadow and Sahara Sand but I discovered that I did not have any Gold Glimmer paper. Horrors! (This will soon be rectified!)

I am very pleased with the final design but this is a very fragile card, due to both its dimensionality and the adhesive used.

As I often do when I'm not quite sure if a design will work the way I've envisioned it, I turned to scrap paper for a mock up. After cutting out the three outline stars as well as a card base and matte, I could quickly see that the star feature would work nicely. However, I wanted to cut a hole behind the stars so I could hang something for added pizazz.

To determine the size I would need, I turned to my punches. The 2 1/2" circle punch seemed right but then I realized that the short reach of the punch would not allow me to position into the centre of my matte and card front. Luckily, I had the Circles Collection Framelits and the 2 3/8" framelit worked well for me.

I attached the mock matte to the mock card front with temporary adhesive and ran them through the Big Shot, using the Magnetic Platform. I was able to centre the star feature over the opening and it looked great! For the hanging piece I decided to use one of the All Is Calm Snowflake Embellishments.

Next, I used my Color Coach to check which colors to use for both the card stock in the star feature and the card base and matte. Because I only had Silver Glimmer paper, not the gold that I had planned to use, I decided to use it with Silver Foil and Lost Lagoon. I found that the Basic Gray was dark enough to provide some nice contrast for the star feature and it worked well as a matte on top of Lost Lagoon.

I then created the star feature for real by cutting three stars from the Silver Glimmer Paper, Silver Foil, and Lost Lagoon card stock.

After cutting a square card base and matte, I adhered the matte temporarily to the card front. I carefully positioned the circle framelit in the centre of the matte, eyeballing rather than measuring it. Because I was cutting through two layers of card stock, I ran the cutting sandwich back and forth through the Big Shot a few times to make sure they had cut both pieces. I then separated the pieces.

Next, I hung the snowflake charm from a piece of silver cord and taped it into place on the card front. I used Fast Fuse to adhere the matte, hiding the taped cord ends.

Next came the most difficult part—assembling the star feature with adhesive.

After deciding on the stacking order for the three stars, I took a reference picture with my iPhone after making sure the placement of all three layers was just right before disassembling it. I find this to be a handy method of remembering how something looked so that I can easily recreate it.

Using a pencil I drew temporary lines where the Glimmer Paper layer crossed the Lost Lagoon layer. I removed the Glimmer Paper and proceeded to cut tiny pieces of Dimensionals to fit between the lines and then carefully adhered the Glimmer Paper. I erased any pencil lines that still could be seen with my white eraser.

I really disliked having to cut up the Dimensionals so I decided to use rolled up glue dots to hold the Foil Paper in place. I positioned the layer and then carefully inserted small sticky balls of glue with tweezers and carefully squeezed the layers together. I also used rolled up glue dots to adhere the star feature to the front of the card.

My final step was to stamp the inside of the card, using sentiments from the Ornamental Pine stamp set. Because I wanted to avoid the hole in the middle of the card, I used my Stamp-a-ma-jig for careful stamp placement.

Here is a close-up of the card front so you can see the glimmer of the papers and the dimensionality of the star feature!



I know that the glue dots are not sticky enough to continuously hold the stars together. I think that a glue gun would be a better choice but I could think of no easy way to figure out where to put the glue on the stars when they are apart from each other!

So, I am calling on those of you reading this blog post to make suggestions for

1. A better adhesive for adhering the layers yet giving dimensionality and
2. A system for applying that adhesive!

Please leave your comments below as I really need your help with this! Thanks!

Built for Free Using: My Stampin Blog