Welcome to my crafty blog. I’m busy making more Christmas cards to sell in aid of our church funds and remembered I’d got these fab poinsettia stamps by Julie Hickey. They’re always popular at Christmas, so perfect for the occasion. I decided to use the current design sketch from Freshly Made Sketches for the layout (https://freshlymadesketches.blogspot.com/)

i started by stamping the large poinsettia stamp on opposite corners of a piece of white card, cut slightly smaller than an A6 card blank. I heat embossed the outline using Wow ‘gold satin pearl’ powder, and then watercoloured the bracts (not petals!) with Distress Ink in ‘fired brick’. The great thing about this technique is that the gold embossing acts as a resist, so the ink is just picked up by the card.

I then cut the ‘Christmas’ sentiment in gold satin card using the Julie Hickey die. As the die leaves the image in the card, I trimmed it off with a narrow border and then mounted a small piece of white card behind it, before fixing it to the front of the card

After mounting the completed topper onto a white A6 card blank, I finished it off by adding some small gold gems for the centres of the poinsettias – I love a bit of bling at Christmas!

I already knew that poinsettias originate from central America, but have discovered that they are named after Joel Roberts Poinsett, who was the first US Minister to Mexico and is credited with introducing them to the USA in the 1820s. I hadn’t realised they’d been popular for so long & thought they were a much more recent trend. Amazing what you can learn from making cards!