Welcome to my crafty blog. Today’s card has got some rather unusual holly on it – I decided to use autumn colours, and I have to say I quite like the effect! I was inspired to try this by the photo on this week’s Inspired by challenges and the layout of the leaves immediately made me think of Julie Hickey’s ‘holly jolly Christmas’ stamp. The leaves also fit perfectly with the new challenge from Global Design Project

I started by stamping the holly background onto a piece of A6 card and embossing it with WOW’s metallic gold powder. I then used ‘ripe persimmon’ & ‘festive berries’ Distress Oxides with ‘eggplant’ Adirondack ink to colour the leaves and berries with a waterbrush.

I trimmed the card down to the edges of the image and mounted it on a layer of gold card before attaching it to an A6 card blank. I die cut a narrow gold frame using Julie Hickey’s square frames & banners set and added that onto the card front.

I finished by adding one of the sentiments from Julie’s ‘vertical Christmas sentiments’ set in ‘eggplant’ onto a die cut banner.

It’s a fairly different colour way for holly (I know it’s evergreen, so hope my friends aren’t all shouting at me!), but I rather like the effect. I do like trying out different twists on stamp sets.