Hello crafty friends. I’m dropping in with a change of pace on today’s card, as I’m not wholly focused on Christmas celebrations today! I’ll be at my church’s outdoor carol service late afternoon (always so lovely with lights strung in the church gardens and a bonfire burning), but then will be heading over to my in-laws to join the celebrations for my father-in-law’s 100th birthday! I decided he needed plenty of candles on his card from the two sets in Tina’s Retro stamps collection (although I drew the line at putting 100 of them on there once I’d worked out that I’d need to stamp them 33 times…!!)

So, having scaled it back to just the 12 candles, I cut a piece of card to fit on a DL slimline blank and started stamping. Working from the left, I went with the candles from the Bijou Retro Elements, then the larger ones from the Retro Candles set, and finally two more of the bijou ones.

I opted to paper piece them all so stamped them onto some offcuts of Antarctica designer paper and started cutting them out… There are several pieces for each set of candles, so I did one set at a time, gluing the pieces into place with Pritt stick so that I didn’t lose track of where they all went!

Rather than paper piece the flames (it was starting to feel very fiddly!) I shaded them with Polychromo pencils, smoothing out the pigment with a blending nib and Dorso oil. I then added in the numbers from the Alphabet Word Chain stamps, ran a black Sharpie around the card edges and attached it to the card blank. The final touch was to highlight the stripes on the candles and the dots on the flames with a fine white Posca pen, which just lifted it.

I’m hoping he likes this, although I don’t think it will compete with the card he’ll have received from His Majesty The King! I’m looking forward to seeing that, which will have been delivered today.

I’m sharing this with a couple of blog challenges, starting with AAA Colourful, whose palette I used. I’m also adding it to the gallery at Love Those Pretty Papers as a final contribution for this month