A Set of Four for Rudolph Day

My word; How the months fly by, and here we are at Rudolph Day again. (For those who don't know what that is, pop over to Stamping for Pleasure, and get inspired to make some Christmas cards on the 25th of each month).

I decided to set my Silhouette to work again for this month, but this time I was cutting card. I have had mixed success at this, but I put a new blade in my machine, and it cut like a dream.

First I used the Silhouette Studio software to make a cutting file for the words Peace & Joy, choosing a font with nice bold lines for ease of cutting. Then I rifled through my Christmas snippets box and

found four pieces of sturdy paper that I thought came from the same pad - Dovecraft I think - which meant they would all cut at the same settings. The cutting mat for the machine has a grid marked on it, (a little annoying because it is marked in inches and I always work metric these days), but I used this to place my offcuts in the right positions to match the words that I had repeated four times on the screen.

Next I set it to cut. I removed the unwanted surrounding paper, carefully so I could use it later, and was left with four sets of words. I mixed the letters up and glued them onto four DL cards. 

Then I wanted a frame to go around them so I adapted a square frame that was already on my library of files, and made it fit  with just enough space to include the words 'Wishing You'. This time I did cut them from vinyl, two from some gold sparkle vinyl, and two from black sparkle. I cut just one to see how it looked and when it came to weeding out the unwanted bits, I found there were over 200 tiny pieces to be removed individually using my faithful pricking tool! The little white square is where I did a test cut to make sure I had the right settings. I made sure I salvaged the centre of each frame with its backing paper intact, so they are in my vinyl snippets box for another time. I used transfer tape to place the frame around my words, and I was quite pleased with it so I went ahead and cut the other three. The black sparkle turned out to be a nightmare, as it was impossible to see the cut lines, so weeding it was guess work at first. But I got them all done. I then used the surrounding papers from the original words to die cut some flowers. They are not quite poinsettias, but near enough. I layered them together with a brad, and glued one to the lower left corner of each card.

My first two cards were made with traditional red and dark green base cards.

Then I made two non-traditional ones with pink and black background.

So that's four more cards to add to my store, and now I shall link them up with the Rudolph Day Challenge over at Sarn's blog, and also with Pixie's Snippets Playground.