Welcome to my crafty blog and another Christmas card, thanks to the ‘holly bells’ stamp from the October 2015 new design club. This is another one I have to confess that I haven’t used until now, probably because it would need shading, which has never been my strong point. I’m so grateful for Barbara Gray’s colouring lessons in the SHAC shack – they gave me the confidence to start shading images.

I started this card by brayering ‘bottle’ Adirondack ink onto one of Clarity’s rectangle background stamps, stamped the image onto a piece of white card and then trimmed it down around the edges. Once it was fully dry, I heat embossed the sentiment with WOW superfine metallic gold powder and then added a few sprinkles of ultra high metallic gold powder onto the top part of the card.

The next step was to stamp the ‘holly bells’ in black Archival ink and colour it in using my Spectrum Noir pencils. Once done I fussy cut it out.

I then added a thin red ribbon across the background – I didn’t want it to run right across the piece, so used my craft knife to cut a small slit at the edge of the inner frame and slid the ribbon through it, anchoring it to the back of the card. I then glued the ‘holly bells’ onto the card front, over the ribbon.

To finish, I popped some red Stickles over the three berries on the image. I left this til last as it takes a while to dry, so I could leave the card to sit flat for a few hours while it dried.

I used a couple of this week’s challenges for inspiration, so am going to share it with them. The layout is from the new sketch at Just Add Ink, and Inspired by have introduced and additional theme each week for a Christmas card – I picked up the colours with the leaves and berries in their photo.