Hello crafty friends and welcome to another Christmas card! It must be that time of year…! I’ve used another one of Claritystamp’s stained glass windows, but this time the small stamp rather than the larger die. I’ve had this one for quite a long time – it always feels good when I use older stamps from my stash! This card took inspiration from a couple of challenges – the colour palette is from Color Throwdown and the layout from Freshly Made Sketches

Now this is one of those cards that didn’t quite turn out as I’d originally intended! I’d started with an A6 card blank, masked off a panel across the front and blended ‘chipped sapphire’ Distress Oxide across it. I then repeat stamped the little star from Clarity’s new ‘nativity miniatures’ set and heat embossed it with WOW’s gold metallic powder. (apologies for the blue tone in the photo – not sure what was going on with the camera on my phone!)

I then popped a strip of heat resistant tape across the blended panel and embossed it with the gold metallic powder. It’s a great way to get an embossed strip across a card.

I then stamped the star window, embossed it with the gold metallic powder and fussy cut it, before blending the ‘chipped sapphire’ across it. I attached it the card front with foam pads, ready to finish the card.

I wasn’t completely happy with it, though – it felt like something was missing. I decided it needed a better background, so cut the the inked panel out of the card front and attached it to a piece of gold card that I’d embossed using Stampin’ Up!’s ‘tasteful textures’ folder.

Now you can see from this photo that I was going to put it onto a dark blue card blank, but I changed my mind again and mounted it onto a white one (mainly because I remembered that CTD had also got white in their colours this week!!). I finished with a few blue pearls – no sentiment, that will go inside the card.

Finally finished! Thanks for dropping in – I’ll be back tomorrow with the new letter from The Alphabet Challenge.