July Rudolph Day Challenge

Well the 25th comes round pretty fast each month, and once again it looks as though I have had a lazy month. In fact I needed quite a few birthday cards for June-August, and they were quickly finished so my visitors could take them back to UK to post, (Spanish postage is becoming very expensive), and needless to say, in the rush I forgot to take any photos.  So now it is time for another Christmas card, and here is mine for this month.

As some of you may know, I recently joined a second choir, which sings more classical music, and I am enjoying having the contrast between that and the more popular-music style of my first choir. At the moment we are working on the first half of Handel's Messiah, for a recital at Christmas, including the wonderful piece "For Unto Us a Child is Born". So I thought what better theme for this month's card.

I have just bought part of a new set of stamps and dies from Crafters Companion called Nature's Garden-Poinsettia Perfection, and one piece is this scroll stamp and die. I had the quotation in my digi word art file but I don't know its origin, and the tiny baby is from a page of digistamps bought from craftuprint. I resized both to fit inside the scroll and printed out two sheets of them on parchment coloured paper. Then I used DI walnut stain to stamp the scroll around them and cut them with the die. I used a water brush to blend the ink a little, and a mixture of water based felt tip pens, and alcohol ink markers to add a little colour to the image. A drop of yellow glitter glue (works better than gold) on the star finished them off, and I had eight toppers ready to use.

I cut eight of my favourite size, base cards which measure 17 x 11.5 cms. These are literally sheets of card from a Lidl's pad cut in half, and I find it a much better size than the UK standard, and they fit the standard elvelopeshere in Spain.

Using four sheets of medium weight white paper, I generously sprayed with a mixture of mica sprays, blue, gold, silver, and 'shimmer', and left them to dry, and then cut eight backing papers and glued them to the card fronts.

My intention was to sponge ink through stencils for the shepherds and angles to make them more subtle, and I even cut the stencils with my Silhouette machine, but I found that the ink did not take well over the mica sprays, so in the end I imported the shapes into my silhouette software and designed cut files for the various sizes. Last night I rummaged through my metallic off-cuts and had a cutting session, eight each of the two shepherd groups, and forty angels of various sizes. I felt black would have made them too dominant, so I cut the shepherds from grey pearlised card.

The card above is the only one I have put together so far, but the rest are ready to go and won't take long to assemble.

Happy Rudolph day folks. Fiollow me over to Scraps of Life by Scrappy Mo, and why not enter a card yourself in her Rudolph Day Challenge for July while you are there.