August Rudolph day challenge

When I have enjoyed a visit from family or friends, it always leaves me feeling a little disorientated and deflated when they leave, so having taken our son to the airport on Monday morning, after a lovely fortnight's visit from him, I needed something to get me going. When I realised that it was already 23rd of the month I knew exactly what I needed to do - make some Christmas cards for the Rudolph day challenge on 25th. 

I have several new cutting files in my silhouette cameo library, some that I have purchased and others I have 'designed', so I went to those for some ideas. The file I chose was purchased from Craftsuprint and is a design by Lyn Simms.

I am trying to do some stash-busting, including my overflowing snippets boxes, but I did not have a enough matching green snippets to cut the panel, wreath, leaves and holly, so I started a new sheet of card and cut them three times. It was tricky cutting the holly branch from card, but I have found that Stampin' Up card is the best for using with my cameo, and it did work quite well. I needed to do a couple of repairs on the stems, but they really don't show. Then I found three snippets of fairly neutral patterned paper for the background panel, and matched them to plain snippets for the other layers. I made three A6 base cards from a colour that toned in with the rest, and glued all the layers together. 

The poinsettias were cut from snippets of dark red mirri-card and the white overlays from vinyl, and I used a yellow brad to hold them all together. The red sentiments are the last of my mini peel-offs.

So here are my three cards, all the same but slightly different!

The cut detail on the background panel looks rather 'lost' in these photos, so I wanted to make them a little more noticeable. In her card, the designer had added tiny red gems to all the berries, but I thought I would need too many for my three cards, so I used liquid perfect pearls instead, and then I felt I needed to add it to the berries on the holly branch as well, so here my first card revised!

As you can see, taking this one in natural lighting, instead of  the artificial lighting I used for the others last night, has brought out the colours better, and the details! But I quite like the tiny red berries so I think I'll add them to the other cards as well.

But first I will link this up with Rudolph Day challenge on Scraps of Life by Scrappy Mo, and also to Pixie's Snippets Playground.