Hi, crafty friends. Something tells me I should apologize for posting the amount of holiday cards I have lately, but I’m not really sorry. Aside from a Halloween card (a rarity around here) on Monday, I’ve posted a Christmas card pretty much every day this week. Here’s another one, this time featuring the Animal Christmas Wreaths stamp set from Lili of the Valley. This set includes a wreath and six different critters to stamp inside. I kind of went outside the box for this one, stamped all the animals together and omitted the wreath entirely.

I didn’t know what color scheme to go for, and my color buddy Liz suggested purple, knowing I’d kind of hate her for it. 😉 I struggle with purple. It’s not my favorite color to begin with, it’s tricky to photograph well, and also difficult to find good matches with ink and cardstock for. AND it’s even hard to find colors that pair well with it. It’s not something I’d normally use for a Christmas card, but I love a good challenge, so I grabbed a bunch of purple Copics and started coloring.

I kind of tried to chicken out a bit by asking Liz if it’d be okay if I added some aqua tones. “Only if purple is the dominant color,” was her answer. With no chance to weasel my way out of purple and into something I’m more comfortable with, there was only one thing to do… keep coloring purple.

I did add a little bit of aqua to not have everything purple. I even tried some blue, but that didn’t really work and I actually covered up the blue… with more purple. Once I finished my coloring, I added a sentiment from the Snow Cute stamp set from Lili of the Valley, stamping it in Wild Wisteria ink from Gina K. Designs. The sentiment is actually a stacked one, but I cut it in half and stamped it on a line instead – it worked better for my card.

I used a black glaze pen to get their eyes extra black and shiny, added a tiny white dot to each eye using the 05 white Gelly Roll, and covered Rudolph’s nose with Glossy Accents. Once dry, I sprinkled on lots of chunky white embossing enamel from Stampendous and melted the granules from the back of the panel for a snowy look.

I adhered my colored panel to a top fold landscape card base I created from Royal Velvet cardstock from Papertrey Ink, and added a thin strip of Sea Glass cardstock from Concord & 9th below the sentiment for an additional element that wasn’t purple.

I used so many colors for this, it’s ridiculous. I used different colors for all the animals, only keeping cheeks, noses and inner ears the same throughout.