First of the year!

In my blog about resolutions, I said I was going to make two Christmas cards a week - well, here's this week's first.

There are lots of challenges around at the moment asking us to use the new stash we got for Christmas - well my pressies only included one die and no other stash. The die will be appearing in a post later this week. But a few days before Christmas I won a super set of Spellbinders dies from a blog challenge, and thought the circles around the edge looked just like snowballs, making it perfect for Christmas cards.

The stamp I used is one that was a magazine freebie a few years ago. I used the largest die to cut and emboss the image, then used the die as a stencil to very lightly chalk blue and grey around some of the edges to add a little depth. It still didn't show up too well against the snowflake backing paper I'd chosen, so I thought I'd add a plain silver oval behind it, but none of my dies was big enough so I hand drew one, using the snowball die as a template and "joining the dots" between the tips of the circles. Then I hand cut it. When I'd positioned everything on the card, the edges had a slightly hand-cut look, so I finished them with flexible peel offs - which of course I then had to use around the rest of the card, too, for the sake of consistency.

I am sharing this with

Jingle Belles - Something Old, Something New
Sweet Stampin - Something new
Crafty Hazelnut's Christmas Challenge - January