Field of Christmas trees

This is one of the two Christmas dies I bought for this year’s cardmaking; I do like border sentiment dies and there is enough detail in this one that the rest of the design can be fairly simple. I divided the card into three sections: sentiment, trees and snow.

Because I was going to make a small batch of five cards, I needed to make sure I could get everything lined up the same way on each of them. I used my glass mat to do the stencilling on — it has grid markings that I could use to line up the card panels and the stencil consistently. A bit of masking tape to hinge the stencil onto the mat and more tape to mark where the card should go did the trick.

For the sentiment, I started by cutting five strips of red card the same height. Again, I used my mat to make sure that I positioned the die straight across the card. Annoyingly, the die is slightly shorter than the width of an A6 card base so I had to be careful when die-cutting: if I had just run it through the machine like any other die I would have ended up with a really obvious vertical mark at the end (there’s no cutting edge there but it still leaves an impression). What I had to do was use the partial die-cutting technique of leaving the end of the die sticking out from underneath the top plate. That way there is no pressure applied there and no nasty mark. Then I just had to use a craft knife to cleanly finish the horizontal cut.

Once the stencilling was dry I glued the sentiments in place. Although I had managed to avoid the mark from the end of the die, there was no easy way to avoid the bottom edge of the die marking the card. I didn’t want to trim the sentiment down and put it lower on the card so I simply covered it up with a thin strip of washi tape, which was probably the hardest part of making this card: trying to get that narrow tape down straight and level…

Then I just had to stick the panels to card bases, add the glittery snow and leave it to dry.

Five more Christmas cards done.

Supplies:

• dies:
  Jeanine’s Art – merry Christmas
• stencils:
  Polkadoodles – accents
• inks:
  Distress oxide – peeled paint
• embellishments:
  Imagination Crafts – detail sparkle – white shimmer
  Little B – silver harlequin 3mm washi tape
• paper and card:
  Papermill Direct – pearlised – natural white
  Papermill Direct – plain – Christmas red
  Hunkydory Adorable Scorable