Merry Christmas--in May!

Ordinarily, I don't make Christmas cards this early in the year. I rail against the big box craft stores putting their Christmas stuff out in June. But, due to the fiasco last year--involving mailing cards on Christmas Eve(!)--I felt I should start a little earlier this year. Having discovered the Merry Monday challenge blog to provide inspiration, this will hopefully be relatively painless!

My first Christmas card for 2015 was inspired by Laura Bassen's lesson on Day 5 of Online Card Classes' "Mask-erade" class. She demonstrated "Masking Patterns." The theme of this week's challenge at Merry Monday is to use newsprint. So I decided to use Laura's technique on a tag that I made from Jillibean Soup's "4 Parts Hero" paper (which I believe is retired).

Instead of stamps, I combined Laura's lesson with one by Debby Hughes (also on Day 5 of class). I die cut snowflakes out of a piece of cardstock, using 2 of Spellbinders' "2013 Snowflake Pendant" dies. Then I layered that stencil over my tag, and smooshed Versamark ink through the snowflake cut-outs. I heat embossed that with Recollections Clear Detail embossing powder, and then inked over the entire tag with Festive Berries Distress ink. The embossed snowflakes resisted the ink, giving a neat two-tone look to the tag. I also punched a hole reinforcer from scrap cardstock, glued that to my tag, and punched a hole through with my 1/4" hole punch. Finally, I threaded brown & red baker's twine through the hole & knotted it.

I die cut my greeting ("Merry Christmas" by Simon Says Stamp) 3 times from brown cardstock. After running the die cuts through my Xyron Sticker Maker, I adhered them together, to create a thicker die cut. I adhered my tag to an A2-size cream card base using foam tape, then glued my greeting over that. To finish off my card, I glued down some red sequins (from Doodlebug Design) with Ranger Multi Medium Matte, and added dots of Diamond Stickles to the centers of the sequins, as well as scattered among them. Finally, I rounded the top right corner with my 1/2" We R Memory Keepers Corner Chomper.

I'm also entering my card in Simon Says Stamp's Wednesday Challenge: "Anything Goes."