Crafty Wednesday – getting ready for the Christmas post

As you may already know, I married into a huge family and have a lot of friends, which means I have many cards to create, each year, including cards for birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, etc. With Christmas just over a month away, I have to make sure I have prepared enough cards and completed in time to be posted and delivered before Christmas Day.

A while back, I showed you the cards I made during a Creative Gathering event and also the painted silk card elements I have prepared for future cards. To date, I have made 26 cards, including the ones I made last weekend, when I completed 10 that were part of the Close To My Heart Frosted card-making kit.

In the kit, one receives paper & card stock, a stamp set, embellishments, & an instruction booklet.

I love the Close To My Heart kits because the instructions are very detailed, from the best way to cut out all the pieces . . .

. . . to the layout.

While I liked the different layouts, I didn’t love them, so I changed things up a bit to better accommodate my personal tastes.

Card 1 demo

The first set of 5 cards (above) required the use of a green paper, stamped with the border stamp that came with the enclosed stamp set. I am not very good at stamping over and over, so thought it would be easier to emboss the pieces with my Cuttlebug. I also did not particularly like the green, so switched it up with some dark teal card stock I had on hand. Also, the stamps were supposed to be in an ink colour I did not have, so I used my Versa Mark sticky pad and blue embossing powder, instead.

my version of card 1

For the next set of cards, I pretty much followed the directions . . . .

. . . but, for some reason, ran out of the brown craft paper, so substituted a different paper for a couple of the cards. Again, I did not have the right ink colour for the background snowflake pattern, so I used a silver ink pad. Here are the two variations:

 The last set of 5 cards that I made used wide strips of coloured paper.

The red bit seemed far too plain for me once it was on the first card, so I decided to emboss it with the medium-sized snowflake stamp that came with the kit, Versa Mark and silver embossing powder. For the next card, I decided to emboss it with the Curly Cuttlebug embossing plate. I found, though, that the card stock had a white core that broke through in places, so I sponged the piece with CTMH‘s White pigment ink pad to disguise the white showing through the paper and make it appear more winter storm-like. The third piece, I thought I would use a red ink on the swirls, which actually brightened up the paper considerably. I then embossed the last two pieces, sponging one with the white, the other with red.

Which of the three variations do you prefer?