Hi, everyone! I’ve got a new Christmas card to share today, featuring some awesome images from Purple Onion Designs.
It’s no secret that I’m a fan of penguins and polar bears, and even though their habitats are on opposite sides of the globe, they’ve come together for this card. I mean look at them; that cute cub with a scarf and hat and that penguin sitting on a present with a candy cane in his hand – just too cute to pass up.
The little polar bear’s name is Icicle, and the penguin’s name is Merry, I love that these characters actually have names! I put Merry on a sled, masked everything and stamped the frozen pond horizon behind my cute critters using fadeout ink from Inkon3.
Here’s a bit of a closeup. I swear the bear has some color, even though he looks very one dimensional here. I stamped a sentiment from the Holiday Blurbs II set in blue ink, fussy cut that with a thin white border and popped it up on the front of my card, making it look like the penguin is wishing you a merry Christmas.
Once I finished my coloring, I took the largest of my A2 Stitched Rectangle STAX dies from My Favorite Things to create a nice edge on my scene. I sprinkled on chunky white embossing enamel from Stampendous, heating the panel from the back until the granules melted. I glued my panel straight onto a top folding card base I made out of Papertrey Ink Blueberry Sky cardstock.
I wish you could feel the texture of the embossing powder once it’s melted. It’s raised, and kind of like braille, it’s really cool. The Gina K foam tape adds a little lift to the speech bubble, but doesn’t add too much bulk, I love it.
The Purple Onion Designs holiday sale starts today and lasts till the end of next week. 25 % off rubber stamps is a really good deal, and nothing stamps better than rubber stamps, I love them so much!
I still haven’t redone my template for the Copic graphic I usually share, I’m hoping to have time to do it next week, I know there are people relying on it to choose colors!
I had a leftover piece from a card I made earlier this year, so the dark blue base and the 
I decided to go for a teal and gray color combo today, and white berries on the wreath instead of red ones. I just used a gray colored pencil to trace around the outline of the berries, everything else is noline colored using Copics. I used a stitched tag die from My Favorite Things to create the actual tag.
I diecut a couple of pieces of scraps of patterned paper using the same die. I chose Julbukett from the Fröjdefull Jul collection from Maja Design and Good Cheer from the Christmas Magic collection from Fancy Pants Designs, which happens to be a collection from 2009, I have a lot of patterned paper. I stamped a to/from stamp from Norsk Stempelblad AS using Hawaiian Shores ink from Papertrey Ink straight onto the patterned paper. I made a hole at the top, added an eyelet, some twine and a bell, and my tag was done.
I wanted my cluster with the sentiment to be more to the right than to the left, so I flipped my image in Photoshop to make the boy and the dog look to the right instead of the left, it fit my card better. It’s one of the great advantages of digital stamps.
Once I’d colored in my image, I used my favorite faux stitch rectangle die from My Favorite Things to turn my colored piece into a panel for the front of my card. I added about half a tiny paper doily from Doodlebug Design, and some die cut scraps of Maja Design patterned paper, before adding a green strip with a word (Christmas hug) from Papirdesign using foam tape.
I added another little piece of the green patterned paper from Maja Design towards the bottom of the left hand side and glued on a few snowdrift sprinkles from Little Things from Lucy’s Cards, before adhering everything to a card base I made out of Soft Stone cardstock from Papertrey Ink. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy, right?
I tried to limit the amount of Copics I used on the snow for this one. Only five (plus the blender) isn’t too shabby.
I used Anyu and Nanook Igloo for my card today. They’re part of the 
I used my trusty faux stitch rectangle die from My Favorite Things to turn my colored piece into a panel before stamping the perfect sentiment from Mama Elephant’s Holiday Messages stamp set using Enchanted Evening ink. I wanted to pick up the blue from the little girl’s coat, and this is such a pretty blue. I sprinkled on chunky white embossing powder and heated the panel from the back to create my snowy look, before adhering my panel onto a cardbase I made from After Midnight cardstock from My Favorite Things. I added a few snowflakes that I diecut using an old Marianne Design die that I absolutely love, and my card was finished.
Here you can see the effect of the chunky white embossing enamel. It’s nice and thick and adds a bit of texture to the card, it kind of feels like braille when you touch it, it’s really cool, not to mention quicker than drawing on snowflakes with a white pen, also with the added bonus of it being more random than you’re able to achieve on your own.
No surprise that I used mostly cool tones for this card, except for the skin colors and the ears and tongue of the dog.
Whenever I have background elements, I pretty much always start with those, and today was no different. I colored in the snow first, both on the roofs and on the ground, before coloring the sky and then the building.
After I’d also colored in the fox, the mailbox and the penguin, I added a sentiment from the 
Plenty of colors used, but there are a lot of images in this one.
I colored in my image using Copics and used a stitched tag die from My Favorite Things to turn it into a tag. I die cut another tag from a scrap piece of patterned paper from last year’s Christmas collection from Maja Design and glued the two together, offset a little bit for the patterned paper one to show. I added a tiny bit of a scrap of a doily to the bottom right corner of my colored tag and a white heat embossed sentiment on top using 1 mm foam squares. I punched a hole near the top, added an eyelet and used some Blueberry Twine from Whisker Graphics that I threaded through the hole.
On the back I used a to/from stamp from Norsk Stempelblad AS that I white heat embossed on blue cardstock from Maja Design. I used my cut align tool to make sure I had an even 1/16″ border around the stamped image. I love that tool, it’s the best thing ever.
Lots of blues used for this one. Another one, too, actually, I’ve made myself a B90 that I also used. What can I say, I love those blues!
I wanted to create a scene with a couple of the cute critters (
When you open the card, the sky’s still there, but below it are the 
I also stamped a sentiment from the new 
In this photo, you can see that there’s another layer of the card behind this panel with the singing critters.
This was a very simple one. I colored up 
I used a stitched circle snowflake die from Memory Box to die cut from white cardstock and glued that on top. I created a hole towards the top and pulled a bit of blue twine through.
On the back I glued a white diecut circle. I stamped a to/from stamp from Norsk Stempelblad AS using Blueberry Sky ink from Papertrey Ink. I also added a few snowflakes die cut from another Memory Box die, and my gift tag was finished.
For today’s card, I used the image “
I die cut the words oh so merry from the Penguin’s Waddle die set from Mama Elephant a few times from white cardstock and stacked them for a dimensional look. I added chunky white embossing enamel to my scene, glued my panel onto a card base made from Pure Poppy cardstock from Papertrey Ink and glued my diecut words in the sky. I stamped and white heat embossed “& bright” from the Holiday messages stamp set from Mama Elephant onto a scrap of the same red cardstock and glued that below my diecut words. I added a few diecut snowflakes with pearls in the centers as my finishing touch.
Lots and lots of marker, many of them used on the snow, believe it or not.
Papirmølla 