Merry Monday, BA Inspiration using Winter Foliage and Christmas Wishes

 Good afternoon, Julie here with a little festive inspiration for you. 

I was inspired by the latest challenge at CAS Christmas Card Challenge and a video I saw on You Tube. In the video the designer used homemade coloured card to create batch Christmas cards and the ladies at CAS Christmas have the cue word Pine, so off I went!

Initially I got out all my sets which included pine branches but mainly used the large pine branch from Winter Foliage to create my two cards. Here are my designs.

My first step was to create my coloured panels. I did this by washing a selection of festive and neutral coloured DIs over some panels of white card, smooshing the leftover ink onto the panels to use up the ink and create some subtle texture. Once these had dried overnight under a heavy weight to flatten the panels, I used two of the neutral panels to create my cards.

CARD 1

The soft grey panel was created using Hickory Smoke DI and I stamped the large branch from Winter Foliage with Versamark along the edge, embossing with white EP. A few of the gaps were stamped with the smaller pine branch from Season Of Beauty. The panel was then trimmed down from A6 to leave a border when added to my dark silver grey A6 card base and the sentiment from Christmas Wishes added to match. For decoration on the boughs, I used some old silver crystals from Home Bargains, that I coloured with Copics and attached them to my branches. The soft colours complement the grey and white of the base.

CARD 2

This time my background panel was made using Old Paper DI which I inked over with the Winter Foliage stencil and the same Old Paper DI and glued to an A6 base card.

From a panel made using Pine Needles DI I cut two branches using the Winter Foliage dies and stamped the foliage in Evergreen Bough DI a couple of times. I used a handmade jig, simply a piece of rectangular card with a die cut aperture, in my MISTI to make sure the die cut stayed in place. 

The bauble was cut using a circle die from a panel of card made using Festive Berries DI. I did 2 layers of red as the initial covering as it wasn't quite dark enough for my purposes. A silver hanger was cut using a magazine freebie die.

The red die cut circle was edged with some more Festive Berries DI and the sentiment stamped and embossed in white EP. The first branch was added as is, but the second branch was cut in two before being added. A small gold ribbon bow completes and the whole bauble was then added to my background.

So that's about it from me, I hope I've given you some ideas to create your own cards.

Thanks for stopping by.