Hello again! I’m back with another of my cards from the weekend, this time the turtle doves from ‘Tina’s Christmas Centrepiece’ collection, which I’m going to share with Sparkles Christmas challenge for their ‘critters’ theme (I hope birds count!) and Love those pretty papers (clearly, I haven’t taken their optional theme of ‘summertime…) It also picks up the central row (birds, free, dry embossing) and right hand column (patterned papers, dry embossing, blue) from TicTacToe‘s grid.

Once again, the centrepiece stamp does most of the work on this, but I gave it a little boost with designer paper and some shading. The first step was to stamp it onto a piece of Antarctica designer paper (my favourite set) using black Archival ink. I wanted to highlight the birds in white, but a pencil won’t do that and a gel pen would have been too harsh. Instead, I opted to take the colour out of the paper with Faber Castell’s ink eraser pencil, which gave the doves and heart a lovely soft tone.

I then highlighted other parts of the image using Pergaliner pencils in blue & purple, to relect the tones in the paper. I mounted the topper on a die cut panel using the nested hearts doode frame-it dies, then added another layer of the Antarctica paper.

I used a square embedder to emboss a frame on the front of a 6×6 card blank and attached the topper in the centre.

I love this image – it works so well with the tones in the Antarctica paper. The other thing that occured to me is that it would make a lovely card for a winter wedding as well, not just for Christmas.