Hello crafty friends and welcome to another late evening blog. I just can’t seem to get myself organised to share my cards earlier in the day! Today’s card uses one of the Christmas rounds dies from Claritystamp – I bought it last year and hadn’t used it so far so it definitely deserved an outing! I decided to use this die when I saw the Christmas inspiration picture from Inspired by – I immediately spotted the Santa in it. I’ve included the elements from the middle column of the TicTacToe board that The Paper Players have challenged us with this week – circles, patterned paper & embossing. I’m also going to share it with TicTacToe challenge as a second offering this week – once again I’ve picked up the top row of their grid with sparkle, embossing & any shape die.

So I started by die cutting the Christmas Santa aperture die in navy card using a nested circle die to fully cut it out.

I mounted the die cut onto a circle of Clarity’s double sided adhesive so I could add glitter to the image. I wanted to give Santa his traditional red outfit whilst keeping the rest white, so die cut the image again into the cover sheet that I’d peeled off one side of the adhesive. I then pieced in the parts I wanted to make red to cover them up and added Perga glitter to the uncovered sticky areas. (it looks brown because of the backing paper still in place)

I then removed the cover paper and added ‘oh gosh’ WOW sparkles to Santa – that’s a lovely red & gold mix. I then peeled off the backing paper & stuck the whole piece onto a larger white die cut circle.

I trimmed down a piece of Clarity;’s ‘great lakes’ designer paper and attached it to a 6×6 card blank, before adding the Santa topper to it. I stamped the sentiment (from Clarity’s Christmas set in Barbara’s handwriting) onto a die cut banner and heat embossed it with WOW’s ‘night of navy’.

I decided it needed a few more stars to finish it off. I wanted them to sparkle, so brayered WOW clear ink onto a piece of white card and embossed it with clear sparkle powder before punching out several stars and gluing them in place.

It took a bit of time to get the glitter in the places I wanted it, but I think it was worth the effort. You can’t really see the sparkle on the stars in this phot, so here’s one at a slightly better angle that also shows the embossing on the sentiment.