A bit of shine for the Rudolph Day of 2017

Well here we are about to start on another challenge to make one or more Christmas cards each month, to save some of the panic when the season approaches. I am doing much better than last year having already made over a dozen cards this month. Half of them are made from recycled cards that I received this Christmas, but I like to make sure they look very different from the originals. However, for today's challenge I am showing a newly made card using a cutting file I purchased last year from the Silhouette store, and didn't get around to using.

The file is for a base card with a shaped cut-out front edge, and a large snowflake topper. 

When ordering some gold vinyl from a supplier in UK, I wanted to make the order sufficient to justify the postage, so I added a metre of five different colours of mosaic holographic film. I have never used this before and I wanted to try it out. I sorted though my stash and found a base card to match each colour of vinyl, and then realised that this would mean the snowflake did not stand out very well. So I used the Sihouette cameo designer edition of software, to make a file that would cut a slightly off-set panel to cover the front of the card. Then I glued this to the card and used transfer tape to add the snowflake, making sure it was exactly aligned with the front edge of the card. Of course this then meant that the left hand side of the snowflake stood out really week, but the right hand side still got lost on the matching card back that it overlapped. So I then managed to cut a panel of the backing paper to go behind this. 

I also made a cutting file of the words using a font called Yana, and cut them from vinyl to match the snowflake.

I rifled through my Christmas snippets box and found suitable papers for each colour, and assembled them all in the same way.

So here is my set of five cards. As you can see, the gold wasn't keen on being photographed, and the silver one picked up colours from everything around it. In fact it was difficult to take any photos of them because the vinyl was so reflective. But this was the best of a bad lot.

So this is all ready to link up with the Rudolph Day Challenge at Scraps of life by Scrappy Mo, in the morning.

Green Butterfly Challenge

I needed something to kick start me card making again after Christmas, and what better than a butterfly card. The Butterfly Challenge this time is to include a Zero, and or use the colour Zucchini. Now I have never used the word Zucchini to describe a colour. If my memory is correct, zucchini in USA are what we in UK call courgettes which are usually pale and dark green stripes. Now I live in Spain I know them as callabacin and they are plain, very dark green. However the challenge remit was anywhere on the green-yellow spectrum, so I dug out my leaf green brusho inks which separate with water to give a lot of yellow too, and made a background with them on very wet watercolour paper.

I left it to dry completely and trimmed it to fit a 11x17 card. I wanted to try a technique that I saw on some blogs before Christmas, where you use a cutting die to dry and wet emboss an image. I used two Wild Rose Studio butterfly dies. I won't write all the technique out here as there is an excellent video that explains it better than I can, by Jennifer McGuire, which you can see HERE.

In her video, Jennifer used a 'wink of stella' pen to highlight the raised areas in the embossing, but when I tried this it reacted with the ink and left a whitish film on it. So I coloured over this as best I could, and then went over it all with a deep yellow Leonie Pujol glitter brush pen which worked a lot better. I used a gold pen to draw in bodies and antennae on the butterflies, and to draw a frame around the card. You can see the detail of this technique better in this close up of the smaller butterfly.

Then I took the narrow pieces I had trimmed from the background card and die cut tiny flowers from the yellow areas which I glued randomly on the background, and some butterflies and the sentiment from the greener pieces, using a Joanna Sheen Signature die. Many of my friends are approaching a 'significant age' so I placed a gold peel-off 70th between the words to comply with the challenge to use a zero.

Now I shall link this up with Mrs A's Butterfly Challenge #69: Z for Zero and Zucchini.