Merry Christmas swirl

There’s this lovely detailed snowflake swirl in one of the Polkadoodles stamp sets I picked up for my Christmas card-making and I really wanted to use it for one of my batch cards. At first, I hit the white space problem, i.e. I am rubbish at placing single elements on a card in a way that looks good — I could see a design I liked, copy it faithfully, and still hate the result…

But then I realised that the swirl is almost exactly half the width of an A6 card base, so I could rotate the card and stamp it twice. And of course, a stamp positioner makes this so much easier.

I wanted to put a sentiment across the middle, but even a chunky black die-cut like this one gets lost in the busyness of the background. To solve that problem, I wrapped a strip of vellum around the centre. Actually, I put two strips around — one wide, one narrow — for a bit of extra interest and to disguise the centre line between the stamping.

With the vellum held in place with tape on the back of the panel, I glued the sentiment on. Oh, I nearly forgot… I could have just die-cut the sentiments from black card, and quite honestly, I’m not sure why I didn’t. What I actually did was cut them from the nearest bit of spare white card and then colour them black with Wink of Luna; my only excuse is that I had cut a test one from white card and didn’t want to waste it, but as for the others…

Next, I used all the colours of detail sparkle: red on the snowflakes, gold and silver on the dots in the swirls, and white in the corners. Then I put them well out of the way to dry completely before sticking the panels to the card bases.

Supplies:

• stamps:
  Polkadoodles – winter flurries
• dies:
  Creative Expressions – merry Christmas
• embellishments:
  Imagination Crafts – detail sparkle – gold gilt, silver gilt, white shimmer, berries
  Wink of Luna – black
• paper and card:
  Papermill Direct – pearlised – natural white
  Strathmore Bristol 300
  Anita’s white vellum