Christmas Craft Creations | Merry Everything | Animals

It’s the second Wednesday of the month which means it is time for a new Christmas Craft Creations challenge! We had a great reception to last month’s challenge and I hope this month’s will be popular too. The theme is animals, and whether you go for stylised or realistic, cute or elegant, that’s entirely up to you! We do have a prize on offer again this month, and you can find the full details on that over on the challenge page.

I decided to create a slimline card for my project, so I started by creating my card base. I had a metric A4 piece of card and I used the width (in portrait) of that piece as the width of my card, then cut at 7″ the other way to score at 3 1/2″. This gave me an 8 1/4″ by 3 1/2″card base. If you are working with American card sizes you may prefer to make 8 1/2″ by by 3 1/2″ to minimise wastage. I used the off cut piece to create a panel that was 1/4″ smaller on each edge.

Next I stamped the ice skating penguins from The Cat’s Pajamas Penguin Christmas stamp set onto my panel. I think this one must have retired as I couldn’t find it on the site, but they have some great Christmas stamps here, and there is another stamp that has a single penguin on ice skates in the Pray For Snow stamp set. I stamped the image initially with with MFT Black Licorice Hybrid Ink, but made sure to leave the stamp in my MISTI so that I could restamp it later.

I masked off the penguins and tore the edge of some scrap paper to create a mask for the background, which I held in place with some washi tape. I then used a Scrapbook.com Stencil Brush to apply Tumbled Glass Distress Oxide onto the lower portion of my panel in order to create the look of an icy pond for my penguins to be skating on.

Once I’d completed the ink blending I removed all the masks and coloured in my penguin image with my Spectrum Noir Illustrator Markers. I added just a touch of Eggshell to add shading to the white portions of their bodies, then used golden yellows for their beaks. I went traditional with red and green for their scarves. I also used  a Sakura Gelly Roll Glitter Gel Pen to colour in their skates, and a fine white gel pen to add subtle lines to the ice to indicate where they’ve been skating.

I returned the panel to my MISTI and restamped the penguins with Versafine Onyx Black ink to make the lines darker and crisper. I also stamped a sentiment from the same stamp set onto my panel. Finally I used Tombow Mono Multi Liquid Glue to adhere the panel to the card base, though if I were to redo it I would probably use double sided tape instead because the glue is very slightly visible through the panel.

I really like how this card turned out. The penguins are so cute! I think the torn edge masking adds a fun touch to the scene. This could have been made as a regular A2 sized card, and could be easily recreated as such, but I think making it as a slimline adds to the peacefulness of the scene.

Love,

Lady Joyful

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Challenges included:

AAA Cards – Along The Edge

Christmas Craft Creations – Animals

Craftyhazelnut’s Christmas Challenge – Anything Christmas

Creatalicious Challenges – Anything Goes

Lil Patch of Crafty Friends – Anything Goes

Merry Little Christmas Challenge – Anything Christmas

Polkadoodles Craft Challenge – Anything Goes

Spectrum Noir Challenge – Anything Goes

STAMPlorations Summer Challenge – Anything Goes

TCP Tuesday Challenge – Slimline

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Check out what the rest of the DT made:

Charlotte (Lady Joyful) – that’s me!

Danka

Joy

Lady

Maaike

Michelle

Penny

Rocky

Shona

Tristan