O Christmas Tree(ts)

Hi! I’m busy creating lots of Christmas cards. Today I finished one that was inspired by the LAWN FAWNATICS CHALLENGE 88 – OH CHRISTMAS TREE that I have spent the last week designing and creating elements for.

Here’s what I created:

(All items are Lawn Fawn unless otherwise noted.)

I wanted to use the How You Bean? Christmas Cookie Add-on Christmas trees to create a Christmas tree. The mice from A Creature was Stirring are there to help with the decorating and the cake stand is helping the one mouse reach to put the star cookie on top. I thought the Baked with Love piping bag would be fun for adding a few of the icing details.

To start I stamped out the images in Crunchy Leaf ink, which is waterproof, on Fabriano Artistico Extra White Hot Pressed watercolor paper. I then painted them with watercolors from The Sprout Creative. I used flat colors for the star, mousewear, mouse noses, and mouse fur and shimmers for the cookie outlines and piping bag tip, trees, and frosting. The background was created with the same yellow and blues that I used on the die cut images (all flat colors.)

Here’s how the background looked after I painted it:

And here’s how things looked after I had adhered all the die cut elements and then started stamping the sentiment and realized I was stamping it backwards:

You see, I had put all the letters onto a block intending to stamp it all at once but because I was really tight on space I decided I would have more success if I stamped each letter individually. I drew out the arc I wanted the letters to follow, took the first letter off the block and stamped where it had been on the block, which was the right side. Argh! I was just a couple steps away from finishing and I managed to mess it up.

So, I painted another background and let it dry, die cut it out (I used a die from the Large Stitched Rectangle Stackables set) and stamped the sentiment using Smitty’s abcs with Pinkfresh Studio Stargazer ink. I cut the die cut elements from the old background, glued them to the new one and glued that panel to a piece of patterned paper from the Let it Shine – Petite Paper Pack and adhered the entire thing to the front of a top-folding A2 card base.

Here’s a nice view showing more of the shimmer and also showing how I tiered the dimension with the bottom of the tree higher and the top of the tree flat:

Another Christmas card done and no traditional color combinations! If that isn’t a sign of how crazy this year has been I don’t know what is!

Thanks so much for stopping by.

I’m entering this into the Simon Says Stamp Instagram Challenge Creating for the Holidays, also.

Hopefully, my next creation will go a little bit more quickly and smoothly!

Take care!

Ruth