FOLLOWING THE STAR

Well it looks like I may make my third post today. (The second one is on my other blog).

In my Creative blog Hop post I said I was working on a run of Christmas cards. I finished them last weekend, but there hasn't been time to do a post about them until now.

Taking part in Christmas challenges has kept me making cards all year, but a few a month is not really enough for me, so I thought I had better try and do a run of one design. I really like Christmas cards that show something of the nativity story, which is after all, what the season is all about, so I sketched  my design on paper, using an idea I found in one of my old files of magazine cut outs, when I was reorganizing my room. And here is the finished card.

For a project like this it is worth putting in some work first, so here is how it was done.

1. I stamped a very old Bethlehem scene, using an Art Impressions stamp, (top left). I scanned it into the computer, and used a graphics program to split it into five elements (centre and bottom left), which I rearranged to look like the final picture (right).

2. I arranged the sections in one line and found I could fit seven lines on one A4 page so I printed this out three times onto cream card. I roughly added patches of brown and yellow with copic markers.

3. This gave me 21 sets of buildings which I cut out by hand! It didn't actually take very long!

4. In Adobe photoshop I made a background using two digital scrapbook papers. I resized it, again so that I could fit seven copies on an A4 page, and printed them out three times. I cut them with my rotary cutter.

5. I found twenty-one pieces of card in various weights and shades of cream, and cut and folded twelve centimetre square, base cards.

6. I matted the background pieces onto navy card - again I managed to get seven out of a sheet of card, and glued them to the right of the base cards.

7. Now it was time to layer the Bethlehem pieces on each one. I just used double sided tape for most layers, but put 1mm pads under the dome-roofed building at the front.

8. I used a file from my silhouette library to cut 21 kings on camels. Originally he was going to stand in the empty panel at the left hand side, but I thought this looked like two unrelated images - Bethlehem and the king, so instead I moved him across so that he overlapped the front building, and cut 21 'half' kings using a different image, and added him behind the first one. I  liked this a lot better. Because I was cutting the kings from paper, and it was already a fairly delicate design, I decided not to try to cut the very thin reins. Instead I drew them in at the end with a fine permanent marker.

9. The final bit was to cut the stars using a Memory Box die. I scrabbled through my mirri-card snippets and found enough little pieces to cut them without starting on a new sheet, so I was pleased about that, and it doesn't matter that there are several different shades of gold.

I didn't feel any sentiment was needed, but on the inserts I used a word art piece referring to the kings, and taken from from the book of Psalms, which is part of a digi set I bought a while back. Sorry I can't remember its origin.

It is not often I do such a big batch of cards but it is a good way of upping my total, and I shall be doing it again very soon I think. And just to prove I really did finish all twenty-one of them, here they all are, complete with inserts and envelopes, and they even have my 'hand made by..' labels on their backs.

As I managed to use up lots of little snippets of gold card, I shall take these over Pixie's Snippets playground week 141.