Hi friends. I hope that you had a great weekend. WordPress is insanely slow this morning and my spellchecker still won't work even though I've worked on it. Frustrating.
Anyhow, I'm pulling double duty for this card as part of my Clean & Simple Tuesday Series and the Clean & Simply Stamping Blog (Fall to Layout, FTL267). Always the perfect sketch. My lighting is awful and I'm also hoping to get that light box up. I meant to this weekend but was gone a lot of the time. I made this card in a jiff and let the patterned paper do a lot of the work for me. I LOVE the City Sidewalks Collection from Pink Paislee. Even though it was released last year, it's a classic and there's nothing wrong with using last year's products. I think the industry is getting way oversaturated and a lot of things are starting to look alike, at least to me, so I'm making it a mission to use what I have and enjoy it. It moves too fast. I don't think anybody needs to release 10 stamp sets a month. It doesn't give you adequate time to use your product until the next release. Then there's other companies where their "I Want It All" is around $700. Stampin' Up! has an annual catalog but with dozens of "promotions" between and that's also very costly. Kits seem to be huge but they sell out very quickly and don't keep up with the demand making it frustrating. And please, don't release your product at midnight EST. That's just crazy as those on the east coast have to stay up if they really want something and if it sells out, you have to wait a long time before it's in stock again and then it's "outdated." I'm fortunate enough to live on Pacific Time so it's only 9 p.m. for me. Bi-monthly releases are nice and even quarterly releases. I like it when companies bundle their product as it's less expensive. I hope the industry is listening to slow down a bit.
Now that I'm off my soapbox which wasn't planned at all, it made me think as I'm using a release from October Papertrey Ink and it was the first time I opened the package. Granted I've been beyond busy, but a lot of us don't have the time to craft daily and I'm one of them, so it just made me think as I had to hurry up and label my dies since a new release was coming up and I had not opened the package yet and I needed to know the names of the dies so I wouldn't be going on a wild goose chase tracking down the names on the website.
Okay, now really my card is coming up. My sketch is from my design team work FTL267. My lighting does not do this card justice. It looks so pretty in real life. It's very unique and I like that. A sleigh would have been the perfect image to use so I might just make another card doing that since I have more of the patterned paper.
The card is an A2 tent size. I cut my patterned paper to 4-1/4 x 3-1/2 and adhered it directly to my Rustic Cream card stock. I then cut a piece of Aqua Mist card stock to 4-1/4 x 1-3/4 and another piece of Rustic Cream card stock to 4-1/4 x 1-5/8. I stamped my sentiment from one of the Think Big Favorites series in the middle using Memento Tuxedo Black ink and then adhered it at the patterned paper line to make the card flow and to break up that line. I grabbed the very cool Christmas tree die-cut from Polka Dot Parade #9 and used my Vagabond to cut it out. I stamped the images onto the tree using the coordinating stamp set onto Rustic Cream card stock and Aqua Mist ink and built up my Christmas tree. The star was die-cut onto silver glitter card stock and adhered to the tree with a bit of foam tape, as was the rest of the Christmas tree for dimension. We all know how I love my dimension. This is a great card to mass produce.
Thank you so much for stopping by to visit me today and have a very blessed day! I'll see you soon with more fun cards. I'd like to make an autumn card and another card about something that is very special to me and my heart, no matter what and that will never change.
Ephesians 4:32. Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.
Hebrews 12:1-2. Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the same, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.
I've been going through a Bible course and in one sermon, it was one of those, "that's me, that's me, that's me" and I never understood what it was, what happened and what it does to you or even the name of it since it was drilled into my head that it can't happen, but it can and it does and it destroys you to your very soul and then you're told it's not true and didn't happen. I will share this with you at a later date in a Get To Know Me blog post, but I'm not going to keep silent about it for too long.
Obviously my blog is not a happy, happy, joy, joy blog, but I do tell the truth and talk about things that are taboo and everybody keeps their mouth shut about it and those are the days I get about 60,000 hits, get complaints from my host, my email inbox fills up to the point I have to pay Google for the extra storage, and close to 10,000 comments that take me months to go through.
EXPERIMENT! The color choices and Christmas-themed paper or even any kind of patterned paper would work.
My tree is stamped using Aqua Mist. Use some colors that are blue from the color wheel.
Although not mentioned above, I did use the Rock 'n Roll technique when stamping my tree with Hawaiian Shores ink.
Beautiful stamping Cindy!