New Stamps and Old Papers for Rudolph Day

Yes it is time to start another round of Rudolph day challenges where we make a Christmas card for the 25th day of each month. This year the challenge is hosted by our friend Scrappymo, at her blog Scraps of Life by Scrappymo!

There are no restrictions as long as your card is for Christmas, so why not come along and join in with the fun.

As I send around 150 cards each Christmas, making one a month is not going to help me much, so I often do a run of my design, but this month I have just made two.

As my header says, I used some new stamps. I saw a card using this image on Maxine´s blog, and liked it enough to send for the stamp, but they had to come from America and arrived too late to use for the Christmas just gone, so I thought I´d ink them up for today.

The image, and both the sentiments, come from a set of stamps called Joy to the World, by Our Daily Bread.

I inked the image twice onto white paper with Expresso truffle Momento ink, and once onto eclipse paper so I could cut it out to use as a mask. With the mask in place I used an ink duster to add tumbled glass distress ink around each image, and then I coloured the images with copic markers.

For the first card I cut the image with a Go Create, frilly squares #9 die. (I don´t know where the name came from because they are not frilly at all, but there is a whole series of these, and they are well worth looking for, as there are some very attractive, and different shapes amongst them). I then cut around the outer edge of the die from blue card to make a narrow mat. The snowflake backing paper is some I rescued from a received card, and I again matted it onto matching blue card, and then a mottled turquoise  base card. I bought a thick A4 pad of this card back in the days when I lived in UK, and a stall in the weekly market sold pads of factory ends of card. Over the weeks I bought one of every colour they had, and I still have enough to last me for my lifetime! Under the topper, I stamped a sentiment from the same set of stamps as the image, and added a few tiny snowflakes to link it to the top.

For the second card I used a Creative Expressions die from the Sue Wilson California collection. I cut a mat in the same way as above, using very dark brown card. I mounted this over another rescued backing paper from a received card, and another turquoise base card, a little larger than before. I needed to link the image to the base so I used left over snippets of the brown card to cut a pair of foliage sprays, using a Joanna Sheen Signature die. I like these dies because they come as a matching pair, one facing each way, which my inbuilt need for balance approves of! I stamped another sentiment from the same set onto an off-cut of the turquoise card and fussy cat around it, then mounted it over the foliage.

So that is my first two cards for next year made, and I will now link them up with:

Rudolph Day Challenge; Christmas,

Pixie´s Snippets Playground, and

Crafty Hazelnuts Christmas Challenge 213: Joy to the World.