Hello everyone – here we are at Seasonal Saturday once again! This week I’ve got a very simple little card to share with you thanks to the colours Tracy has given us at 52 Christmas Card Throwdown and a first outing for one of the wonderful new Wee Christmas Friends & Family Silhouette stamps, sat on one of the Bijou Christmas Drop Shadow sentiments. Now, brown isn’t a tone I’d normally associate with red & green on Christmas cards, but then I spotted the little robin on perched on the watering can in the stamps, and off I went!

I opted to make this on a one layer card, so took a 5×5 card blank and first embossed a frame on the front with a square embedder and a ball tool. If you haven’t seen these before, they’re shapes of stencil material – I attached the embedder to the front of the card with low tack tape, then flipped the card open, located the edges of the embedder with a bone folder and sharpened the creases with the ball tool.

Now I’d got the embossed frame on the card, I could stamp the sentiment into place with ‘potting soil’ Archival ink

Finally, it was the turn of the robin. These is a solid silhouette stamp but I wanted to use the three colours on it, which is where the Stamp Pen Pro came into it’s own as it makes it so easy to rotate the stamp. I first inked up the robin & watering can side of the stamp using the edge of a ‘walnut stain’ Distress Oxide, then carefully tapped the robin’s chest on the corner of a ‘festive berries’ pad. Having then inked up the holly leaves against the edge of a ‘rustic wilderness’ Distress Oxide pad, I was ready to stamp it into place – and that was it!

The most complicated aspect of this little card was getting the three ink colours onto the stamp! That robin is so cute perched on the watering can, and a traditional image of a British Christmas – did you know that the robin is the national bird of England? Anyway, how will you use these three colours on a Christmas card? We can’t wait to see you in the 52CCT gallery.

Meanwhile, this little chap is off to make an appearance in a few other galleries, picking up the CAS theme at Sparkles Christmas, the ‘nature’ theme at Simply Clean & Simple, and ‘anything goes’ at Peace on Earth.