Hello crafty friends. It’s a grey and wet Seasonal Saturday here, but I’ve got a cheery Christmas card to brighten your day, courtesy of our new sketch at 52 Christmas Card Throwdown. It’s been a busy old week and I had to take a bit of time to think about what I was going to use on this card – always difficult to find your crafting mojo when your head’s been in other places, and I’m always better when I can start with a theme or prompt! Anyway, I managed to find a few spare minutes and remembered Linda’s Christmas Treasures sampler stamps, deciding I could work one of them into my design.

I started by stamping the little church image onto a spare bit of white card and heat embossing it with WOW’s super fine gold powder. I trimmed it down to give me a narrow edge, mounted it on a piece of gold card and shaded the image with Polychromo pencils. I also stamped and heat embossed one of the Art Deco Sentiments and mounted that on a piece of gold card – these little toppers are a greay way to use up some of your offcuts.

I was pondering on the background and in the end settled on a piece of dark blue Antarctica companion paper, drawing stripes onto it with a fine gold Posca pen, mounting it on another piece of gold card and attaching it to an A6 card blank. I then simply added the toppers to the card front.

So, will you come and add to your Christmas stash with us at 52CCT? As ever, there’s more inspiration from the rest of the design team over on the blog – we can’t wait to see what you do with Fabiola’s sketch.

And sticking with the Christmas theme, I’m also going to add this to the galleries at ABC Christmas Challenge for their ‘just enough’ (ie CAS) theme, and at Holly and Ivy where it’s always ‘anything goes’.