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!

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