Merry Little Christmas

Hi there! Are you in the Christmas spirit? I have to confess I had a bit of a tough time getting going, with Thanksgiving being right before everyone seemed to just fall into Christmas. But once we put up our tree, and we got some snow on the ground (just a little - not too much, yet) I started feeling that Christmas glow.

I'm making more Christmas cards this week for my club to stamp this weekend. They really enjoyed the last round and I'm looking forward to sharing more designs with them. This is the first one, and it was inspired by a card I saw in last year's holiday catalog. I'm doing three challenges with this card: Mojo Monday sketch, SUO Challenges (nontraditional Christmas), and CASology (snowflakes).

I'm not sure how I ended up with these colors - I wanted blue and chose Night of Navy, then in looking for something to put with it I just landed on Soft Suede. I think I like it! The main panel is from the holiday stamp set called Merry Little Christmas. I colored it with markers, then cut it out with the Chalk Talk die, then finally added the ornamental accents with the Stamp-a-ma-jig. It was easy to center them using the die-cut shape as a guide.

I hunted through everything I had looking for something to layer behind my tag. In the end I'm featuring a new product that will be available in January in the new spring catalog. It's called a Tag Topper punch and we have two coming out - the other one does a traditional angled tag. I just punched both ends to make a shape that fit my stamped panel. The card stock going into the punch is cut at 2" (actually I found I needed to shave just a hair off of that) and for this piece I cut the length at 3 3/8". Pretty sweet - I love finding little tricks to get my layers!

Another new product in the spring catalog is the scallop embossing folder. For the rest of my card I used navy dotted paper, two Festive Flurry snowflakes (I decorated one with the chalk marker), natural trim, white baker's twine, and a navy button. One more tip for you: to keep my white snowflake from sticking off the edge of the card, I cut a notch in one of the points and then hid that behind the ribbon.

What do you think of the nontraditional Christmas look? Of the two other cards I have planned as of now, one will be more traditional, and the other one ... won't! I like to mix it up sometimes! But you'll have to check back for those. In the meantime thanks for stopping by!