Hello everyone and welcome to Seasonal Saturday! This week at 52 Christmas Card Thowdown Fabiola’s given us a sketch to play with and I decided to do something a bit different from my usual inky style. I was struggling with how to create the layout using inks and stencils and then remembered the Christmas Papers – the perfect solution! I also called the Block Print Circle dies back into action, having had them out recently, together with one of the new Tall Art Deco sentiments – read on to see how it all came together.

I selected two of the Christmas papers that would work well together – the small holly and large poinsettia designs. One of the helpful things about the pack is that each design comes in four colourways, so they’re easy to co-ordinate together – I went with the cream background on these two. Having covered the front of a 5×7 card blank with a piece of dark green Shenandoah companion paper, I cut two pieces of the Christmas papers, trimming the bottom edge at an angle (I don’t have any banner dies, so this was the easiest way to approach it. In order to get the bottom edges cut at the same angle, I held the two pieces together and cut them simultaneously with my guillotine. It was then an easy matter to glue them onto the card front with Pritt stick.

I found a very close match for the cream backgrounds in the Antarctica companion papers and cut it out with the Block Print Circle die. Having stamped the sentiment into the centre using ‘library green’ Archival ink and backed it with a piece of the Shenandoah companion paper that I’d cut with a nested circle die. I glued it into place on the card front and finished with a few gold gems from my stash.

It’s strange not to be using inks on my card (other thank for the sentiment), but the papers were exactly what I needed for this sketch. And I’m going to share this with a couple of other Christmas challenges – Holly and Ivy and Merry Little Christmas for the seasonal theme, plus Love Those Pretty Papers‘ ‘anything goes’ option.