Festive Friday - Get more from your sentiments, some BA Inspiration

 Good morning, hope you are well and keeping safe and sane! Julie here with a little bit of Festive BA Fun this Friday. 

I have made a resolution to make Christmas cards all through the year, so that I'm not rushing around at the end of November making them like I was last year! Hopefully I won't have as much time on my hands this year, meeting up with friends and relatives will be at the top of my agenda, so I need to use this 'free' time to get ahead. So far I've made four!

So for my first Festive Friday post, I am concentrating on SENTIMENTS. Yup those little stamps that come with the more interesting stamp sets or the fab sentiments sets such as Festive Sentiments and Most Wonderful. 

Another resolution I made towards the end of last year was to use up my scraps and backgrounds that I have accumulated and it was after rummaging through these, that I got the idea for my theme for this post.

My first card uses a LOT of sentiments that I got together from my Uniko sets, some old and some new, some current, others sadly retired. I made them way back in 2019 but didn't use them all and in the spirit of waste not want not, here is my card design.

To make the panels, I started by laying an A5 panel of card in my MISTI, then arranged the stamps to cover the whole area. When satisfied with the arrangement I closed the MISTI door and inked up the stamps with Versamark and then stamped on to the card panel, added clear EP and heat embossed. I didn't remove the stamps and used a selection of different coloured card in festive colours to create multiple backgrounds which I can use later. A selection of little stamps were used to fill in any gaps too small for a sentiment.

For this card I took a bright red stamped panel and added it to an A6 card base, trimming off any overhang. The snowy landscape was cut twice using a Marianne die and added to the bottom of the card and excess trimmed away. A little Wink of Stella adds a bit of sparkle. No need for a sentiment as they are there in the background!

Here are a couple more ideas using the same technique that I made with the first of my panels, you may recognise them. 

   

Just click the image if you want to find out more.

Of course sentiments aren't just for Christmas, you can use any of your sentiments to create a background!

Keeping up the theme of making sentiments center stage, here is my second card. 

This uses a few sentiments in different fonts and sizes that I stamped onto card, heat embossed with fine white EP and trimmed down. The colour of the strips were chosen to match my backing which I stamped using Background Blocks Falling Snowflakes and the separate snowflake stamps from Snowflake Serenade in non traditional colours. I used a die cut funky Christmas tree as a template to create the centerpiece, adding each trimmed down strip starting from the bottom. A star punched from holographic card and a holographic gem on the red pot complete. The completed panel was then added to a red A6 note card. 

Here is the same idea from 2019 using a more traditional colourway.

So that's about it from me for today. I hope I've given you a few ideas for using those very useful sentiment stamps.

Stay safe and keep crafting!