Easing into Christmas…..in July

Hi everyone! Happy Wednesday! Hope you’re all having a wonderful summer so far. We’re about at the mid-way point of Summer so I thought it would be a good time to ease you into Christmas. It’s Christmas in July, cue up your favorite Christmas music and let me share today’s card with you!

Let me preface by saying that I’m the worst kind of holiday card procrastinator. I’m the one that gets into October with the thought that I have 12 weeks until Christmas, plenty of time to make cards. Then before you know it December 1^st rolls around and I’m panicking because I’ve only managed to make one card for Christmas. The reality is that for us procrastinators, October is reserved for making Halloween cards, lol! I could go on, but you get the picture. Maybe I’m in good company?!

For today’s card, I’m using the fun Holly Christmas stamp created by Totally Tracy for Dare 2B Artzy! I love the Totally Tracy stamps because they’re so whimsical and great to get creative with mixed media.

I say that I’m easing into Christmas because while today’s card features Christmas stamps, it does not use traditional Christmas colors. That’s OK though, I kind of like the purple and blue-green poinsettia flowers.

To start, I stamped two sets of the poinsettia flowers from the stamp set using some Dare 2B Artzy, Totally Black ink using my MISTI stamping tool.

I colored the flowers using some new alcohol markers I had from Altenew. They’re not quite like the Copics I’m used to, but they blend well and the colors mix pretty well. For one flower I combined the blue shades with the lighter green shades and on the other I used the purple and a hint of salmon-pink. I think it provided some fun highlights and definition to the flowers. For the flower centers, I actually used a combination of yellow and brown and just dotted on the colors to combine them. When I finished coloring, I used a White Sakura Gelly Roll pen to add some white accents onto the flowers.  Both flowers were die cut using the matching dies.

Next, I colored up the holly leaves using a combination of shades of green and blue and die cut them as well with the matching dies.

Once everything was colored, I moved onto my background. I had used the Dare 2B Artzy Trellis background die a couple of weeks ago with the shiny black cardstock, however when I ran it through my Evolution Die Cut machine it didn’t cut all of the little details. The piece was still useable – it just had some pieces that didn’t cut all the way through. The Trellis background die is very detailed so it cuts better with my Gemini die cutting machine. Since I didn’t throw away the original trellis I had cut, I had it available to use for today’s project. I simply went in with a retractable blade and cut the remaining pieces out by hand using a resalable cutting mat. It takes some time, but is better than throwing out cardstock that’s still useable.

Once everything was cut, I paired up the Trellis background with a piece of white glitter cardstock. I just love the contrast of black and white with one sparkling and the other glossy. It’s very cool. I glued the lattice to the white glitter cardstock with some liquid glue and set some acrylic blocks on top of it until it was dry.

Next, I glued the Holly leaves down to the lattice work and added the poinsettia flowers using some dimensional foam.

Finally, I stamped the Joy sentiment from the Holly Christmas stamp set on to a piece of the shiny black cardstock and set it with some Ranger White Super Fine Embossing powder. Once I’d finished heat setting the embossing powder, I fussy cut out the sentiment and popped it onto one of the poinsettias with some dimensional foam.

This card is very non-traditional as far as Christmas cards go, but I really like the colors and the way it turned out. The black and white contrast in the background really makes the poinsettias and holly leaves pops.  I hope you’ve enjoyed my first Christmas card of the season and that you are inspired to get a jump start on your holiday card making – even if it is July.

Thanks for stopping by! Have a crafty day!

Hugs,

Tonya

Links are included below to items used in creating today’s card.