Hi, crafty friends. It’s been a while since my last post. Things have been crazy busy this past month, and I’ve had zero time in my craft room, and not even time to write blog posts for cards that were finished before things went bananas. The annual holiday sale from Purple Onion Designs is a great way to come out of hibernation, though.

Winter and Balsam from the latest Christmas release from Stacey Yacula are exchanging gifts. They both look pretty happy to be out in the snow in front of Santa’s workshop. I snuck in the Santa silhouette in the sky and stamped a sentiment from the Santa Sentiments set in the snow.

I love creating these scenes with Stacey’s images. It’s a time consuming process, as I create masks for each critter and fussy cut them, but the end result is always worth it.

I stamped Winter and Balsam using Extreme Black ink from My Favorite Things before covering both of them with masks. I then did second generation stamping of Santa’s workshop using Memento Rich Cocoa ink, using first generation for the signage only. I like the softer look of the brown lettering in the background. I stamped the silhouette of Santa’s sleigh using VersaFine Onyx Black ink AFTER I’d colored in the entire scene. This is an ink that stamps very black and very crisp, but it’s a pigment ink and doesn’t play well with Copics, so it’s best to leave it to the end. I stamped the sentiment using Blueberry Sky ink from Papertrey Ink.

I also went back over the “cast iron” of the OPEN sign using a 0.3 cool gray multiliner from Copic and added white dots on the penguin’s hat and scarf using my white Gelly Roll 05.

I sprinkled on chunky white embossing enamel from Stampendous, melted the granules from the back of the paper and adhered my finished scene onto a 5 3/4 x 4 1/2″ white card base, making this card slightly larger than the regular A2 size card.

Lots of Copics used for this one.

There are some awesome stamps in the Black Friday – Cyber Monday deals category over at the Purple Onion Designs store, a few of my very favorites even. Take advantage of this massive sale while you can.