Christmas Cards Two Ways

Hello again its Julie here.  I think we are all probably in the midst of getting ourselves ready for the festive season and I thought I would show you a couple of Christmas card ideas I've been working on.
Firstly I've used my wonderful Tim Holtz Distress inks as watercolours to create a fun background for this jolly little card and I also coloured in the gorgeous new Shimelle Santa stamp with the distress inks to create a soft vintage effect.  Let me go through what I used for this card.

I "smooshed" Mowed Lawn, Festive Berries and Evergreen Bough onto an acrylic stamp block to use them as "paints".  I then used a water brush as my paintbrush to paint the colours on a piece of watercolour paper to create a background.

You don't have to be precise and you can choose whichever colours you like.  Whilst waiting for this to dry I then used Festive Berries, Tattered Rose, Tumbled Glass and Pumice Stone to colour in the adorable Shimelle stamp.  All I did was stamp the stamp on a piece of watercolour paper in Memento London Fog, I found this created a softer outline and then again used my water brush to "paint" the colours onto Santa.  Tattered Rose is a gorgeous skin tone and even though Santa's beard is white, a light wash of Pumice Stone added a bit of depth.  When the background was dry, I cut out several snowflakes and a Christmas tree using my Sizzix Big shot machine, there are so many to choose from a visit to the Papermaze website is your best place to start.  I put the snowflakes in the background, then the Christmas tree and added Santa as a centrepiece popped up using adhesive foam dots.  I also used some Holiday Divine Twine to create a little banner to put my words "JOY" onto.  I created these letters by using double sided sticky paper that I created by running it through my Xyron sticker maker twice and then I added Cosmic Shimmer Polished Silk Glitter which leaves a smooth silky glitter surface which is almost completely flat.

For the second card I used the gorgeous new Creative Expressions Frosty Swirls embossing folder and my Big shot to emboss the card base.  I inked the edges using Tumbled Glass distress ink to add a little pop to the embossing.  I then cut out three Christmas trees and adhered them together to create a 3D tree and cut another tree in a contrasting colour to outline the smaller trees.  The 3d tree presses flat to go into an envelope but pops back out when the card is opened.  I used a penant die to create a little tag to which I added a Merry and Bright sentiment from the Crafters Companion Die'sire collection, it is so detailed and cuts out beautifully.  For the papers on this card I used the beautiful Bo Bunny Candy Cane Lane collection as I wanted to use slightly less traditional festive colours.  As a final touch I added two small holly leaves from the Shimelle collection.

I hope you enjoyed seeing these two Christmas cards and thanks for looking xxxx