Sweet Stampin' ~ Christmas Creations

Hey crafty friends, it's our last challenge for the year at Sweet Stampin' and we've a whole month to enjoy Christmas entries! This longer challenge allows for the team to catch their breath, do some Christmas shopping and wrapping and general prep. So we will be back in the New Year with the next challenge. Today though, we're keen to see all the gorgeous Christmas Creations folks are making! Whether it's gift tags, journal pages about Christmas, Layouts or Christmas Cards, they're all welcome, provided there's some stamping involved.

I've used a fun mix of Whimsy Stamps elements to create this card. I started with the bauble paper, which brought to mind the recent make I did with the spotlight technique using a stencil to create spotlight circles like this. So I was prompted to think how I might embellish this paper and those baubles. I pulled out a few Whimsy Stamps sets which have bauble themes and got to work stamping the background with Versamark Ink and two different metallic embossing powders in copper and silver to add a little texture, interest and fun to the bauble paper. 

Some of the baubles on the paper were lighter and once I'd added the heat embossed metallic elements, the tops of the baubles disappeared as they were so light, so I drew in a few 'tops' to complete the design with metallic pens. The squiggly one in the lower left is a great example of this, if you compare the image above with the first image in the post. I just followed the lines of the design and drew in the bits that were so light, they weren't easily visible. I also added some domed flat back embellishments on some of the smaller baubles, for a bit of added height and interest. This is a very playful, fun design. I finished off the card with a gorgeous diecut sentiment from Whimsy Stamps. I had done some ink blending for a previous make and had a little square left over which was perfect to diecut the background for the word die from and the colour worked perfectly with the paper. I opted for silver glitter cardstock for the words and diecut those, adhering them with Xyron glue for a quick easy fix on a fiddly word die, which worked really well. I only have a narrow version, but it's perfect for this kind of fiddly element and also works great on vellum too.

Thanks for popping in today, I hope you enjoyed this slightly different but ever so fun crafty make from me. Not often I let myself go wild experimenting and playing with a design like this, but it was a fun project, so clearly, I need to do this more! I'm way too comfortable in my 'safe zone' of crafting, sticking to what I know and like. Quite freeing to just play and see what happens! I hope you'll come and play along with us this time for our month long Christmas challenge, we'd really love to see what creative fun you have too! I'll be sharing this make with my Whimsy DT hat on too, so the following pics use those watermarks. 

Hugs and happy crafting, Wends xoxo

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