I’ve been playing with the sketch for the Paper Pals challenge for a few days now. For some reason I decided that I wanted to use vellum and that was quite an added twist. I also decided that I wanted to add in the Global Design Project challenge this week which was inspiration from a card by Brian King. I picked the Christmas theme and cherry cobbler from Brian’s card as inspiration.

Here’s the sketch – not an easy one for me!

And Brian’s inspiration card:

I decided that the tag and backing piece were going to be a Christmas ornament with a gold foil embellishment as the tag itself. I stamped the ornament from Embellished Ornaments in cherry cobbler on very vanilla and cut it out along with the gold foil medallion using the delicate ornament thinlits dies. I carefully glued the medallion onto the ornament. That part was easy! As was cutting out the ornament top in more gold foil. Even the bow wasn’t too tricky. I then took a piece of vellum from the winter wonderland designer vellum stack and, after using the embossing buddy to prevent stray pieces of powder, stamped the sentiment in versamark. I seem to be getting a lot of use out of the sentiments in this month’s Paper Pumpkin Mistletoe and Holly kit. I then sprinkled on the cherry embossing powder and, putting the vellum onto a metal lid from a storage tin, heated it. This keeps the paper from curling – I got this tip from Brian King’s site. Wow, almost a year ago now, it’s lucky I remembered that he used a lid from a tin of shortbread. I stuck the completed ornament (minus the bow) onto the vellum.

This was when I ran into trouble. I put tiny tiny blobs of glue onto the back of the vellum using the fine glue tip pen, putting the glue where the gold spots were. Perfect. I have read that glue shows through so I was ultra careful. Except, the glue spread and showed. One ruined card.

But wait, maybe I could save some! I cut out the gold ornament topper with the dies first and then the rest of the ornament so that I could piece them back together. Then I left them alone for a few days!

Yesterday I made another embossed piece of vellum and tried cutting glue dots small enough to hide them behind the gold spots. Have you ever tried cutting our glue dots into five pieces? I wouldn’t recommend it. I finally had inspiration – mostly, I think, due to the fact that I hadn’t yet trimmed the vellum down from the 6 inch width. I cut another piece of cherry cobbler at 1/4″ smaller than the cardbase and wrapped the vellum around this securing it on the back with fast fuse. I added the pieced together ornament and added the gold bow with a glue dot – well I had to use them somewhere, they had been tossed aside previously. With no glue showing through, I happily glued the piece of cherry cobbler to the cardbase.

See you tomorrow,

Liz

I set some time aside today for some crafting fun and looked at some challenges for inspiration. I started with CAS Colours and Sketches where I found an intriguing combination of colours. I don’t think it’s one I’d have put together anyway.

Here’s the banner which inspired the card

I started by using the Paper Pumpkin November 2015 Mistletoe and Holly set that was still out from a couple of days ago but it was going in just an “only alright” direction. So I started again. A few days ago on Facebook’s group Create with Ronda, I’d seen Holly Obier post a card using sponging and spritzing of this ornament and I thought that lost lagoon and watermelon wonder would work really well. So much so that I made two cards and stamped the sentiment on each (from the Mistletoe and Holly set) and declared them done. Until I realized that I was missing the metallic silver part of the challenge. Oops.

I got out my blender pen and my refill bottle of versamark watermark ink and carefully added the ink to two rows on the bauble before sprinking on the silver embossing powder and heating. Here’s a close up showing the silver embossing gleaming a little more.

The very vanilla piece was then added to a lost lagoon card base. It’s funny that lost lagoon was one of this week’s colours – I’d been thinking a few days ago that I’ve been neglecting this beautiful colour. I lined the envelope with the retired backgrounds DSP in lost lagoon.

I’m also entering this card in the Global Design Project challenge this week where it’s a theme challenge of Christmas. Just sliding in under the wire since the linkup closes in about an hour!

See you tomorrow,

Liz