Hello everyone. It’s Seasonal Saturday in my little corner of the crafting world and our latest challenge at 52 Christmas Card Throwdown. I’m hosting the challenges this month and have gone with a non-traditional colour theme for this week. It gave me the perfect excuse to put one of the new Wee Floral Swirls stencils into action, which is also not the most obvious Christmas design, but I think works when you bring it all together!

I cut a piece of premium card slightly smaller than a 5×5 card blank and lined the stencil up on it – it’s the second from the left on the bottom row in the product pic. The stencil mate that comes with the set is a perfect way to mask around the outer edges and keep your background clean. I then used the small ink blending brushes to first add ‘tattered rose’ Distress Oxide into the centre flower and ‘rustic wilderness’ into the surrounding swirls. While the stencil was still in place, I used the ‘nougat’ Polychromo pencil to shade in the two rows of dots.

I was trying to think of a suitable sentiment to fit into the stencilled image, then remembered the KISS Sentiment Rounds stamps – these are a set of semi-circular stamps and the great thing about them is that you can stretch them out on a stamp mount to fit the depth of curve you want, which is exactly what I did! Having aligned it around the top of the stencilled image, I stamped it into place with the ‘rustic wilderness’ Distress Oxide and then simply attached the topper to my 5×5 card blank.

As always, there’s more inspiration from my 52CCT team-mates over on the challenge blog and I’d love to see how you interpret my colour palette on your seasonal cards.

And I’m going to share this with a few other challenges: Peace on Earth; Simply Clean & Simple; and Stencil Fun, picking up the ‘anything goes’ options at all of them.