Hello again! I did warn you this morning that I’d be back again today – this time we’ve got an intruiging recipe at As You See It challenge, put together by my teamie Heather H. As you can see, our recipe has got five elements in it and they all need to feature on your cards. It’s not an obvious Christmas recipe, but I needed to sort this week’s seasonal card (still managing one each week after four months!) and I managed to tick off two of the elements straight away with one of my favourite Clarity dies – the deerscape aperture (animals and die, in case you were wondering!)

So, let’s walk through what I did and how I incorporated the other elements.

I first cut the die into a piece of navy cardstock, then trimmed it out of the aperture and cut it to 3.5″ wide so that it would fit on my topper. I ran WOW’s clear ink pen across the top edge and heat embossed a snowy landscape with their white superfine powder. I also heat embossed the sentiment from Jayne’s bijou postcard set. Now my plan at this point ws to also sprinkle WOW’s ultra high embossing powder onto the deer and heat set it, but it all blew off every time I tried to heat it from underneath as the deer shapes are too small, although a few sprinkles did stay on the card base. Needless to say, I abandoned that plan!

Now I’ve had a piece of stencil card that I’d coloured with inks and shaving foam in my stash pile for far too long (lets be honest, it’s a few years since I made it!) and I glue the die cut onto it – I think it looks a bit like the Northern Lights and it picked up the colouring element of our recipe. Next came the hardest part for me – adding twine, which I rarely use. I had some white twine in my stash, so wound it round the card a couple of times before attaching the topper to a mount of the navy card.

Finally, I needed to add tecture or embossing, so out came one of my favourite embedders to emboss a frame on the front of a 5×5 card blank, which the topper sat neatly within. You can just see it in this photo, but it’s a bit clearer in the one at the beginning of this post.

And so, having made this Christmas card, I’m off to share it with 52 Christmas Card Throwdown where their theme is embossing, and The Holly and Ivy whose theme is always ‘anything goes’.