Welcome to my crafty blog – I’m back after a couple of days offline. Life got very busy and I just ran out of steam, but I’ve managed to have a lovely afternoon making cards with a friend so all is now good in my crafty world! I decided to make another early Christmas card – I do seem to be developing a bit of a theme of holly and gold this year. This one uses the new ‘holly jolly’ Christmas stamp and profile dies from Julie Hickey.

I started by cutting a gold frame using Julie’s ‘rectangle layer frames’ set and glued that to the front of an A6 card blank. I then added three strips of gold card against the right hand side of the frame.

the next step was to stamp the holly background onto a strip of white card using WOW clear embossing ink. I heat embossed it with ‘gold metallic’ powder and then used a waterbrush to add Distress Oxides in ‘mowed lawn’ and ‘iced spruce’ to the leaves. I attached the card across the gold strips, and then added drops of red sparkly Stickles glue to the berries.

I finished by embossing a scrap piece of white card with WOW’s ‘cranberry sparkle’ powder and then die cut ‘joy’ from that. I then glued that onto the card front.

Thanks for dropping in. I’ve got several blog challenges to catch up with from the past few days, so I’m starting by sharing this card with ThePaperPlayers as I used their sketch for the layout. Inkspirational‘s theme is ‘spots/dots’ and I’m hoping my holly berries will meet that brief as well.