Merry, white on white

Snowflakes were definitely my main theme this year. I did have a whole bunch of other ideas scribbled down in my notebook, but somehow I got sidetracked away from my original plans. Maybe I’ll work on some of those for next year’s cards.

This time I combined the snowflakes with a double merry cutout that I created with my Cricut Maker. For complex designs like the snowflakes, I prefer to buy dies — they can give a neater finish and I really don’t want to spend loads of time designing my own snowflakes. For simple things like this, I’d sooner make them myself. Of course it does involve one of my least favourite things — choosing fonts — but once I’d found one and tweaked the R into a stencil-type shape (so I wouldn’t have to place the centres of all the Rs), making the cutout was straightforward.

I also cut it out of stencil plastic with the intention of making an ink-blended version, though I didn’t get around to doing that in the end either. But I did use the stencil version to add Versamark to the card base and then heat-embossed the letters with a sparkly embossing powder. I glued the cutout layer on top and then left it under a couple of books for a while to make sure it all flattened out nicely.

Once that was done, I cut some more snowflakes out of pearlised card and added a random scattering across the card to finish it off.