Hi! I have another entry to share for the Superstar contest over at My Favorite Things. This time, it’s a card for the Clean and Simple Genius category. I keep saying I don’t really like red for Christmas, but for someone who doesn’t, I’ve made a lot of red Christmas cards this year.

I blame the cardinal. I really wanted to create something of a scene with this bird flying to trees in the distance to add the star to the top, and I couldn’t really choose any other color for him.

Onto a piece of X-Press It cardstock, I stamped the hillside in a grayish green ink, before using the Sending Christmas Joy die to partially cut from it. I only wanted the word joy to be cut from the white panel, so I made sure not to cut the words above by not having the cutting plates cover the top two words of the die as I ran everything through my die cutting machine. I did this twice, stacking the two layers together, trimming off a little on each side before adhering it to a cardbase I created from Wild Cherry cardstock. I added the center of the o back in, and really love how the cardbase is showing through the opening of the die cut letters.

I die cut my little colored cardinal with the Christmas Cheer die set that coordinates with the Christmas Cheer stamp set, added two more die cut layers behind him for stability and a little bit of dimension and adhered him to the front of the card.

I stamped part of a sentiment from the Itty Bitty Holiday stamp set with Wild Cherry Ink and used the Itty Bitty Strips dies to turn them into strips. I added two more layers behind each of them so they’d be flush with my cardinal and adhered them to the card.

Here you can see the tiny bit of dimension you get by stacking die cuts and also the recessed JOY.

I’d like to say that I didn’t use a lot of colors for this, and I really didn’t, but that bird isn’t very big. Maybe 7 markers to color red was overkill? Maybe 4 greens for that tiny scarf was? I tend to go overboard with my colors, but that is one cute bird in the end. Even if he IS red 😉