Christmas at Sweet Stampin' ~ Shake It Up

Hey there lovely crafty pals. How's your Christmas crafting going?! I'm moving towards having a few cards ready, but man I've a whole stack still to do! I'm happy to have this wee creation under my belt and added to the Christmas Card pile. We are encouraging you at Christmas at Sweet Stampin' to add to your Christmas stash throughout the year, to avoid the mad Christmas rush right at the end of the year! So let me show you my creation for this month. 

I've used a super cute Magnolia image. It's a sweet lil' reindeer mid flight. So I've coloured him up to be 'Rudolph' of course with his sweet red nose. I used my Promarkers to colour him up a while back. He was inked in Brown Memento Ink as I thought that would suit this image and give him a softer look.

I've created a shaker card and backed the little window with an old paint chip which makes the shaker base really slippery and fun. So the sequins glide around easily against this slippery base. I've used a mix of sequins and little gem stars, which I thought worked well for this card with it's star shaped aperture.

I diecut the letters to create this 'NOEL' sentiment and cut them from a green cardstock. But when I brought them up to the patterned paper, the colour of the cardstock was not quite a perfect match for the darker green in the papers. So I used a darker green Promarker to colour the paper to tone better with the backing paper. 

I've created a really tidy finish to the star by folding the lovely paper from a Making Cards Magazine around the backing card, rather than cutting the star shape to leave raw edges. I really like this finish for this card. I've done this previously with the same shaker card base. You might recall here and here. This creation here, I used the same base kit, but inked directly on the base card rather than wrap patterned paper around it.

I used the cardstock with the star from the base kit to trace the shape on the back of my patterned paper. Then using an x-acto knife, I cut from the peaks and middle points of the star in towards the centre. This doesn't have to be perfect, just good enough to get a pretty clean fold on each peak.

This is what the paper looked like after I'd cut the patterned paper using the cardstock as the base template. After making the cuts, I simply laid the cardstock under the patterned paper and with the pattern facing outwards, flipped the two over and proceeded to add adhesive and gently ease each cut strip back over the base template. Done slowly and carefully, it comes up a treat and gives such a tidy lovely finish to the star aperture. After this, you add the acetate layers and the rest of the shaker layers as normal.

So that's a lil' tutorial on the folded finish to the aperture. Nothing you couldn't work out I'm sure, but just in case you'd not thought of doing this before, I thought I'd share my process.

I hope you'll be inspired to get on with some Christmas crafting, I daren't tell you how few weeks we have now! I'm kicking into high gear! Do come and join in the fun with the Christmas at Sweet Stampin' crew if you do get Christmas crafting.

We'd love to see what you're inspired to do. There's no 'theme' other than Christmas, so it's easy peasy to join in! Stop into the blog to check out what my talented teamies have been up to. Their creations are fabulous! I'll see you again very soon with another crafty adventure. Hugs, Wends xoxo

Challenge Entries:

Lemon Shortbread: #76 ~ Anything Goes

Not Just Cards: September ~ Anything Goes

Papercraft Challenges: #20 ~ Special Occasions

613 Avenue Create: Anything Goes + CAS option

Love To Scrap Challenge: #113 ~ Anything Goes

The Holly and The Ivy: #36 ~ Anything Christmas Goes

Merry Little Christmas Challenge: #2 ~ Anything Christmas Goes

Update: I've just spotted I made the Top 3 at Not Just Cards! Woohoo, thank you so much ladies! I'm thrilled xoxo