After 8 cards in green and red, I needed a change. The obvious choice was to make a sandy colour the main colour of these cards, as that’s a colour I’ve worked a fair bit previously. The sandy colour gives an old feeling to the cards, which work nicely at Christmas, I think.
This first card was made specifically. It is the first (and so far only) card I have made knowing the recipient prior to making the card. For all the other cards, I have decided on who gets which card only after I have made them. It made the making of the card a little easier, as I had an idea of what I wanted to achieve.
As you may notice, the style of this stamp is different to the ones I have used previously for the Christmas cards and that was intentional, I think it suits the recipient quite well. Colouring it was fairly easy, but I wish I had a better pen for colouring snow with (which I have since acquired!). A sandy background colour is very easy to work with, as you can use pretty much any colour to compliment it and I chose red.
I wanted a fairly patterned background and braved combining different papers where a lot of each paper was visible. This is something I’ve previously not done a lot of, and hope to do more of in the future. To add a bit more to it, I decided on my favourites; the big snowflake and some pearls. As well as a pressie sticker, which (despite its random colours) work nicely to break from the earthly tones, I think.
I quite liked the dark red snowflake background and reused it generously. I made a border on the very left, which I separated off with a snowflake, and then used the same background as a border around the text stamp. I finally attempted using the text stamp on the cardstock rather than on the specifically purchased white card for ink, and I am very pleased it didn’t bleed the colour. I will do this a lot more from now on! Another patterned card was used to make a narrow border at the top and bottom of the left side of the card. The text stamp I used is from North Star Stamps.
The right side of the card was made to match the left with the red snowflake background with a greeting area covering the majority of that side leaving only enough space for half snowflakes above and below to create a break between the red and the sandy backgrounds. The border around the greeting was self-made and I added a gingerbread stamp in the corner.
The second card uses the Shepherd stamp by Sarah Kay for Stampavie. I coloured it a bit differently than on the last card where I used this stamp. Instead of using many pearls as decoration here, I tried one of my small snowflake stamps, which I think added a nice pattern to the perhaps dull sandy background.
The inside of this second card closely matches the previous card, with a different text stamp. Additionally I decided to reuse the tree background from the front on the right side, moved the greeting area down a bit and put the snowflake on top only.
I am really quite pleased with how both of these cards turned out!
