Hi, crafty friends. A couple of weeks ago, Jenn Shurkus asked me if I wanted to join in to share inspiration for her Get Cracking on Christmas series this year. It’s all about creating Christmas cards all year to prevent being swamped and not have time come November. As you may have noticed, I make Christmas cards all year, and of course, I immediately accepted. It’s the third Thursday of every month, and today happens to be the third Thursday of January, so here we go.

For my first card, I chose to feature this adorable image from Lee Holland. Last year, he asked his followers and fans what more we wanted of his dragons (he is known for his dragons, he has lots of different ones), and I suggested one hugging a penguin. He came through big time, and created this image, which I, of course, had to get. I colored it in noline, because I love the look, before sprinkling Chunky White embossing enamel on top and melting the granules from the back of the paper to create that wonderful snowy look.

I taped a square die inside a rectangle die from Waffle Flower and die cut the two dies four times from Stamper’s Select White cardstock from Papertrey Ink to create a chunky polaroid frame for my little fellas to fit into. By taping the two dies together, they won’t shift and the square opening will be in the same spot for all my diecut pieces. I stacked my diecuts and put the image behind my chunky frame, before adhering it all to a cardbase I created from Stormy Sea cardstock from Papertrey Ink. Using a die from Kort & Godt, I die cut the word klem three times from the same color cardstock. The die actually cuts the word juleklem (Christmas hug in Norwegian), but it’s so big the first part didn’t fit my card, so I just chose the latter half of the word. I stacked three together for dimension, adhered it at an angle to my card, and put a white heat embossed sub sentiment from Norsk Stempelblad AS below. This too, has additional layers of cardstock behind it for dimension. To finish off the card, I die cut a few white snowflakes using dies from Hero Arts and Marianne Design, and I stacked two of each snowflake on top of each other to make them stand out a bit.

Fairly simple color palette for this image.