Happy Holidays In A Floral Sort Of Way

Hello friends,

Are you thinking about your Christmas cards yet? At our house, we have so many we send out that I have to get a jump on it! Here is one of the creations so far.

This card is made from the new Floral Happy Holidays Flora & Fauna stamp set and the matching Holiday Foliage die set. In this set, there are cute flowers, foliage, and an adorable bird.

I started by stamping Happy Holidays in the center (really slightly high of center) of a black cardstock panel. It was stamped with Versamark ink, sprinkled white embossing powder and then heat set.

I loved the way it turned out so I added a border using the second to the largest die of the Whimsy Stamp Stitched Nesting Rectangle die set.

Next, the flowers and bird were white heat embossed and colored with Copic markers.  I don’t like the Copic markers to color the embossing powder if you get near it. So, the way I got around this was to use a stamp positioner tool (like a MISTI or Tim Holtz Stamp Platform), stamp the flowers and the bird onto white cardstock first with Lawn Fawn Yeti white ink and then dried the ink with my heat tool. I left the paper in the stamp positioner  – I even left it in while I colored it so that after the coloring is done, the paper is still in the same original position so I can simply stamp it again with Versamark ink and emboss it with white embossing powder.

With the flowers and bird all done, I moved on to die cut the foliage. I cut the full set of foliage out of three colors of cardstock – Candy necklace, Easter Grass, and Caramel Apple. This way I have lots of choices to mix and match with.

All the elements are done so it is time to assemble. Using a Candy Necklace cardstock card base, I applied a panel of patterned paper from the Penny Black Festive and Frosty paper pack on top that was cut from the same Whimsy Stamp Hand Stitched Rectangles (largest one). The black Happy Holidays panel was added with foam mounting tape to pop it up. The flowers and foliage were applied with bits of foam tape for a few of the elements and the rest adhered with Tombow Mono Dots Adhesive. Red dots were added with Nuvo Red Berry crystal drops.

The card is actually done, but to complicate my world, I decided to fill in the stitching with white gel pen. If you like this look, I highly recommend you do it before the elements are added to the panel to save on extra stress!

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