Christmas Card Do-Over

The holidays are over - I hope everyone had a wonderful one! I received lots of beautiful Christmas cards this year - I love getting cards in the mail! There was one in particular, from my mother & father-in-law, that when I saw it, my first thought was, "I could do that!" Have you ever seen something in a store - a card, or article of clothing, or home decor item - and you've found yourself thinking that you could do that yourself? Well, that's what we're going to do today - a Christmas card do-over. Let's start by seeing the original card:

Isn't that pretty? And pretty simple when you really look at it. The first thing I needed to do was choose my papers. I really like Close To My Heart's "Mistletoe" paper pack, so I decided I would use that:

Here are the three papers I chose to use. The one on the left will be the small tree, the one in the middle will be the card's base, and the one on the right will be the striped paper that the trees are mounted to. Now, in order to create the main tree image with the star, I chose to use a flourish stamp and the clear embossing resist technique. This is how it worked:

First, I needed to create a mask for my tree shape.

After I had the mask cut out of regular copy paper, I placed a piece of light green cardstock behind it (in this case, Sweet Leaf from CTMH):

Next, I used an embossing ink and stamped my flourish image onto the green cardstock through the mask. This way, the image would be imprinted only on my tree shape, making it easier to trim out later:

After stamping the image, cover it with clear embossing powder and heat emboss:

Now, in order to get the light green swirls on a dark green background, I used a sponge and New England Ivy ink and sponged over the entire image:

When you're done it should look like this:

You can add as much or as little ink as you like - I actually decided that the green was not dark enough, so I went back with some Olive ink as well to try & darken it up a bit. When you're done inking, wipe over the image with a paper towel to pick up any ink that may be on the clear embossing. The embossing resists the ink, letting the cardstock underneath show through. Now you will trim the embossed triangle out.

The next step will be to create the border/mount for the embossed tree. In order to do that, I took my original mask and traced it very lightly onto a piece of Colonial White cardstock, being sure to leave room at the top for the star. I stamped a star image with embossing ink and embossed the image with gold embossing powder:

Now you can trim around the traced outline and the star, leaving about 1/8" around, then erase the outline:

The embossed tree can then be adhered to the middle of this piece:

The second, smaller tree is a simple trim from patterned paper. In order to make it look more like the original, I drew in some dots around the circles with a gold glitter pen. The next piece will be the striped background. The original had a thin gold stripe around the entire border, plus a white scalloped border inside of that. I was able to use a dot border stamp I had and heat emboss the top half of it with white embossing powder to achieve the same look:

Once that was done, all that was left to do was assemble the pieces. Unbelieveably enough, I do not own any gold ribbon, so I used the closest thing I had which was Buttercup ribbon from CTMH. And instead of embossing a sentiment at the bottom of the card, I hand-wrote one with my gold glitter pen. Here is the final result:

Not too shabby, if I do say so myself! When you find yourself thinking, "I can do that" - try it! You may find that you have hidden duplication talents you never knew you had!