Happy Christmas tree

The first of my small batches of Christmas cards this year, and the simplest. It’s very rare that I make stamping the focal point of a card; most stamping is quickly followed by colouring… But I wanted designs that would be easy to reproduce and that wouldn’t take hours to make.

I am okay at stamping most of the time, but I have never been able to successfully line up clear stamps to fix something that didn’t stamp correctly the first time. This makes a stamp positioner an absolute must-have piece of equipment for me: being able to stamp a sentiment on a finished piece of colouring without worrying about getting an incomplete impression is a great stress reliever. It also means you can make duplicates and only have to line things up once. So, for this card, I stamped the tree in green on five pieces of card (all the same size) and then lined up the Happy Christmas on the positioner and stamped all five sentiments in red.

Once I was sure the ink was properly dry, I created the torn edges. Another one of those things that I can do by hand, but not necessarily consistently. To avoid messy edges and torn stamping, I used one of the We R Memory Keepers tear guides, which produced a lovely neat tear, even on a coated cardstock.

A bit of double-sided tape to stick it to the card base and it was ready for the finishing touches: a small gold star and glittery baubles, red for the sentiment and gold and silver for the branches. Then all I had to do was to wait for them to dry without being tempted to put my finger in the glitter.

Supplies:

• stamps:
  Polkadoodles – heartfelt tree
• inks:
  Ranger archival – leaf green, carnation red
• embellishments:
  Imagination Crafts detail sparkle – gold gilt, silver gilt, berries
  small gold star
• paper and card:
  Distress specialty stamping paper
  Hunkydory Adorable Scorable – cotton white
• miscellaneous:
  We R Memory Keepers tear guides