Snowflake Pines

Welcome to another fun challenge from Our Creative Corner! This week we are making monochromatic cards (one color plus neutrals of choice). I decided to use one of my favorite colors - blue - which oddly enough I haven't used yet on an OCC card. I'm also breaking out several products from the holiday mini for the first time. This was fun, fun, fun!

I started out by stamping the trees from Patterned Pines (one of the hostess sets you can earn from the mini) with Versamark on night of navy cardstock and white embossing. I used white and bashful blue layers and the ticket corner punch. The background is embossed with the Petals-a-Plenty folder, and for embellishments over the background I used white satin ribbon and silver cord. The sentiment is from Teeny Tiny Wishes (this is becoming my go-to sentiment set) and punched with word window and modern label punches.

I want to highlight my snowflake with a little mini tutorial. I really wanted to layer my snowflake (punched with the new snowflake punch) with both white and bashful blue, so I started playing around just to see what I can come up with. Here is a mini tutorial of what I did.

1. Punch the base snowflake (mine is whisper white) and set it aside.

2. Punch the snowflake you're going to layer on top (mine is bashful blue).

3. Snip off the larger of the "prongs" on each arm of the snowflake.

4. Cut each arm off at desired length (more on the length in a minute).

5. Using any glue pen (I used two-way glue), adhere the layered arms on top of the base arms. Here you can see where I made my cuts. Cut them longer first and see where you want them - if they are too short then the snowflake prongs overlap.

6. Place a small punched circle (mine is 3/4") on the back of your snowflake. This makes the snowflake more stable and also gives you something to put your brad through. I used navy cardstock so it would blend into the background.

7. Put a large brad (mine is a filigree brad) through the center and attach to your project. (Sorry for the slightly blurry photo of my finished snowflake!)

Here is another variation: you can leave a little more of the original snowflake and adhere directly over the base. This gives more of a two-tone look than a layered look. I actually made this one first but ended up using the layered one. I think they are both very cool, though!

OK, that's it from me. Be sure to check out the rest of the OCC team members' samples and prepare to be wowed! We hope you play along this week. Thanks so much for visiting!