Christmas is on Its Way!

Send a Smile 4 Kids has a bi-weekly themed card making challenge. The main requirements are that the project is a card that is appropriate for a child, and that it fit the theme. The theme for the current challenge is "Early Holiday Wishes 4 Kids." I found the following sketch on Pinterest, and thought the mittens hung from the line were cute:

I don't have a postage stamp die or punch, so I thought I'd use a pair of decorative edge scissors with a postage stamp-style blade. Unfortunately, the scissor pattern was too big for the itty bitty pieces I wanted to cut, so I ended up using a different, scalloped pair. I cut out 13 small rectangles from cardstock & patterned papers from my scrap stash. (That was actually most of the work involved in making this card!)

For the base of the card front, I really had a hard time coming up with what color I wanted. I knew my focal panel with the greeting would be white, so I didn't want a white background. But nothing else I tried seemed to work with the different colors in the patterned papers, and also wasn't too "heavy" visually. Finally, I thought of kraft, and it worked! I spattered droplets of Dylusions "White Linen" and Heidi Swapp Color Shine "Tinsel" spray inks over it, just to jazz it up a little and hopefully give it at least a little bit of depth and interest.

I stamped the greeting from Inkadinkado's "Warm Holiday Wishes" set on a piece of white cardstock, using Stampabilities Cherry Red pigment ink. I die cut & embossed it with one of the dies from Spellbinders' Ironwork Accents set, which I felt had a "snowflakey" look to it, and enough room for my greeting.

For the mittens, I fussy cut one of the mittens from the sketch I'd resized & printed out, and used it as a pattern. I chose 3 different patterned paper scraps for the pairs of mittens. I adhered my pattern with temporary adhesive to the scraps, flipping it over to create the opposite mitten for each pair, and cut them out. I did end up doing some black faux stitching lines on all the mittens, just to give them a little more dimension.

I glued down all the little rectangles on the card front panel. I also went ahead & glued down the greeting die cut, cutting off the overhanging edge. I poked holes in the background, and stitched with some silver embroidery floss to create the "clothesline." Then I glued the mittens in place, overlapping the stitched line. For the rectangle in the bottom left corner, I white heat embossed a snowflake from the same stamp set as the greeting on the green cardstock, since I felt another mitten (as shown in the sketch) might be a little too much pattern. Finally, I adhered the completed card front to an A2 card base.