Hello there. I’m on a bit of a roll with Christmas cards this weekend – I batch made a load more this afternoon but took time to play with the poinsettia stamp & die from Julie Hickey Designs as well. I’ve used three current challenges to create the design for this card. The layout takes the sketch at Atlantic Hearts, and I used the left hand diagonal from TicTacToe‘s grid for the colours (blue, red & yellow). The team at TGIF have challenged us not to use any white card on our creations, which is very unusual for me!

So I started by making a red 5×7 card base, in place of my usual white ones. I die cut a mat using Julie’s rectangle layers & frames set in a yellowy-gold card and attached it to the card front.

I stamped the poinsettia onto a strip of vellum and heat embossed it with WOW’s gold satin powder. I then coloured the bracts (they’re not petals on a poinsettia!) on the reverse of the vellum with a red Pergacolour pen, using a yellow one for the centre. I glued the vellum to the card front, putting the glue on the back of the poinsettia and a dot in each corner.

I stamped, embossed and coloured a second poinsettia on vellum, and used the co-ordinating die to cut out the inner bracts. I glued those onto the first poinsettia, and added two navy Glossies in the corners os the vellum to cover the glue.

I die cut the ‘Christmas frame’ word in navy card, trimmed it out of the frame and glued it to the card front. The final touch were the two sprigs of berries, again cut in navy card and glued into place.

I really like the effect of the vellum panel on this card – I don’t think to use it often enough and it looks great with heat embossing on it.