Hi, everyone! Time for yet another Christmas card today. This could technically work as a regular winter card, too, and those cards are good to have on hand to send out during those dark winter months to brighten someone’s day.
I used Anyu and Nanook Igloo for my card today. They’re part of the Anyu and Nanook set. I set the opacity to 10 % in Photoshop and printed my image. I love the look of no line coloring, especially when doing snow and ice. I colored in my little image using Copics, and wasn’t too sure at first what I wanted to do with it. I debated my regular cluster with a sentiment in the top right corner, but felt I needed to do something different because I had so much white space below the image.
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.
I love these stamps!! And I do believe this is the first time I’ve colored a goose! And it’s such a cute goose too, she (her name is 
I was going to make a 5×7″ card, but changed my mind. It meant that 
The bears are 
To me, this color scheme is a bit untraditional, but I didn’t want to go with the same red and green combo I used for my last card, so I had to come up with something new. Somehow, I had it in my head (thanks to Liz) that my toy store needed to be red, so I came up with a combination of a pink based red, a light, peachy color and a brighter green than the greens I usually go for.
Lots of Copics used for this one, I did color in the whole front of the card, after all. I stamped the background using Fadeout ink from Inkon3, so once my Copic coloring was done, I went in with a gray Prismacolor for details on the windows and a little bit of brown for the horse and the ribbon on the presents in the display windows.
When I first got the stamps, the first thing I did was create masks for each and every single one of them. Time consuming, sure, but so worth it to be able to create scenes like this. For this card, I started by stamping the S
I colored the scene using Copics, making sure to use muted, soft colors for the background and brighter colors and more detailed coloring for the snowman and his friends. That penguin chick had me, I love him!! I stamped a sentiment from the 
I cut my colored piece down a little and was going to add it to a 5×7″ card base, but realized I’d cut too much off the height, so I had to shrink the card front accordingly. The finished card measures 5 x 6 1/2″. A bit of an unusual size, I guess, but I think it works. I added a piece of green patterned paper from Papirdesign to my white side folding card base and mounted my colored piece with plenty of foam tape. Normally I’d use Stormy Sea card stock for my base, but I didn’t have a piece big enough, and that patterned paper (without much of a pattern) was a great match.
Lots of colors for this one, but I used the ones before T7 on the snow alone… No wonder it’s a lot.
I colored up the cute 
I die cut the tag an additional two times, once in a red patterned paper that I glued on the back of my colored piece, and once in a green patterned paper that I offset and glued on the back for a little interest. I stamped the standard To/From (this particular stamp is from Norsk Stempelblad AS) on the green patterned paper using Olive Twist ink from Papertrey Ink.
Underneath the kitten I stamped ho ho ho from the Scripty Xmas stamp set from Mama Elephant, using that same Olive Twist color ink. I added a bit of red lacey ribbon to the hole on the top of the tag, tied a bow around it using a very fine thread that I think is meant for warping looms, it used to be my grandmother’s. I added a little bell charm to the bow, I thought it was a nice finishing touch.
Not a whole lot of colors used for this one, but the image isn’t very big either.
I felt like I really needed to add a photo of the kitten in the tree. She was very content up there.
Once I’d colored the image with Copics, I used the largest die in the A2 Stitched Rectangle STAX Set 2 from My Favorite Things to die cut a landscape oriented panel that would fit perfectly on my card base with a 1/16″ border around. I like the 1/16″ little frame, AND it’s the same width as the distance from the faux stitching to the cut line. I like having them the same. Little details like that matter, to paraphrase a famous German architect (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who coined the term “God is in the details”).
I created a top fold card from Stormy Sea cardstock from Papertrey Ink. It’s a color that matches the BG90 family from Copic really really REALLY well. I need to order more, I only have half a sheet left of this color. I used the same color cardstock to diecut the word wishes using a die from Mama Elephant that was free with purchase if you spent a certain amount during their birthday extravaganza back in September. Normally I’d diecut the word several times in the color I wanted, but since I was running super low on this particular grayish green, I used a few layers of white diecut words, and only one layer of the colored cardstock on top. I stamped and white heat embossed the word “holiday” from the Iconic Ornament stamp set from Mama Elephant, also free with purchase over a certain amount on the Mama Elephant site back in September. I added a few more layers of cardstock behind it for dimension and glued it to my sky using Gina K liquid glue, which I also used for the die cut word.
I decided not to add any additional elements. No embellishments, no nothing, I didn’t want to distract too much from that adorable image.
Not a lot of Copics for this one, and 14 of these were used for the snow and polar bear.
Papirmølla 