Hello crafty friends. Here we are on day 10 of my ’12 Dies of Clarity’ challenge and I’m making some 2022 Christmas cards already! This lovely ‘noel aperture’ die is from the October Craft Club, and I did use it to make some of my 2021 cards. It’s very easy to produce quick cards by just cutting it into a piece of Clarity designer paper and mounting it onto a card, but I thought I’d step these two up a bit with some sparkle.

For the first one, I just cut the die into a square of sparkly silver card and attached it to a black 5×5 card blank.

I then recut the die in sparkly gold, and pieced in the inner parts of the baubles. I’d put and adhesive sheet on the back of the card before cutting it so all the pieces were sticky, but I have to confess that it is a bit fiddly with the small baubles – it’s worth the effort though. The other advantage of this is that you get two for one – keep the small pieces from the first silver die cut and then piece them onto the gold one. It would work really well pairing a bright metallic colour with the silver or gold too.

For the second card, I started by brayering WOW clear ink onto a square of white card and then heat embossed it with ‘Carnival’ powder. This time I cut the die in white card and attached it to the sparkly background. One slight problem is that the embossed card does curl up, so I left it under a storage box for a couple of hours to flatten out.

I attached the topper to a black 5×5 card blank, and then glued one of Clarity’s ‘nested doodle frame-it’ frames around the edge.

Thanks for dropping in. I’m going to share these over at The Paper Players – their first challenge of 2022 is ‘make 2022 sparkle’ -but they didn’t say when the sparkle had to be for so I hope they don’t mind that these are 11 months early!!

And just for good measure, here’s a final look at the two cards, so you can really see that sparkle!