Christmas Smiles

This fun Christmas card was put together almost entirely from snippets. The only part that wasn’t a snippet was the card base itself! Three challenges inspired the creation of this card, and those were Paper Smooches‘ holiday themed challenge, Mod Squad‘s trees and snow, and Lawnscaping Challenge‘s let it snow.

I started by creating my character. First I stamped the hat, which comes from Simon Says Stamp’s Christmas Cats set, then I masked it off and stamped the dog from Paper Smooches’ Chubby Chums. I coloured the dog and hat with my watercolour pencils then blended it out with Wink of Stella to add a hint of sparkle. Then I fussy cut the image out and set it aside.

I decided to have a look through my box of precut pieces. These are pieces that I’ve die cut or fussy cut for previous projects but ended up not using. I found a strip of glitter paper that I’d used on my recent snow globe card and decided to combine that with a circle cut from a snippet of pearlised blue card to make a background for my dog. I also found the tree, again leftover from my snow globe card, as well as the two clouds cut from blue vellum using the smallest Lawn Fawn Simple Puffy Clouds die.

At this point I decided to assemble my image panel. I used my tape runner to adhere the glitter strip to the bottom of the blue circle, then ran it back through my Big shot to make sure it was cut to fit perfectly. I used a little liquid glue on the back of my tree and dog to attach the clouds to them, as well as the tree to the dog. I then used more liquid glue all over the back of them (except the visible portions of the clouds) and pressed them into place on my circle. I used my tape runner to adhere the circle to the card base. I then used a white gel pen to add dots of falling snow across the whole image panel.

The final step was to add the sentiment. I chose the “smiles” sentiment from Lawn Fawn’s Merry Messages because it seemed to go well with the cute dog!

I’m very pleased with how this turned out! It was really nice to be able to use up some of the odds and ends I had from previous projects and still have them come together to make something that looked good (if I do say so myself!) I’m not entirely sure how I feel about the gel pen dots… to me it just looks a bit messy… Maybe I would have felt better about it if I had done paint splatter instead of trying to manually add the dots.

Love,

Lady Joyful