Hello crafty friends. Welcome to Wednesday and a bonus Christmas card for you (it’s definitely not Seasonal Saturday!), thanks to our new challenge at Addicted to Stamps & More! I kept this one squarely in my happy CAS place with a one layer card, and still managed to combine two stamp sets for it, the Floral Elements Set 5 and Timestamp’s Retro Bird Tiles

First, I stamped the two leafy sprays from the Floral Elements set onto a 5×5 card blank using ‘library green’ Archival ink. I then added the two little single birds from the Timestamp set with ‘espresso’ Archival.

The next step was to add shading with Polychromo pencils – greens for the leaves and a red across the birds’ breasts to turn them into robins. There is a fab little dot stamp in set 4 of the Floral Elements collection, which I used with ‘red geranium’ Archival to add some berries to the leaves, before stamping the sentiment, again with the ‘library green’.

I wanted to frame the image, but was having trouble finding an embedder the right size when it occurred to me that it would work on the diagonal – so I embossed a diamond frame around the image.

So that’s an extra Christmas card in the bag, over and above my weekly personal goal! I think this design would be great for batch making too. Will you join our Christmas challenge this week? Come and share your creation in the ATSM gallery – it’s open until 16th March. I found the perfect colours for my card at Color Dare, together with the ‘anything goes’ theme at Merry Little Christmas.