Holiday Season Harmony

Since Operation Write Home is no longer accepting cards, I'm starting to focus more on making cards for Send a Smile 4 Kids, and building up my own stash. Challenge #168 at Merry Monday is to make a Christmas card using pastel colors. I came up with this card, inspired by this one I found on Pinterest:

To begin, I stamped one of the images from Hero Arts' "Christmas Crystals" set on a scrap of Strathmore Mixed Media paper, using Versamark ink. I then heat embossed that with Ranger Liquid Platinum embossing powder. I chose 3 colors of Zig Clean Color pens, and colored in the different sections of the crystal. The blue I actually had to scribble off onto an acrylic block, and pick it up with a wet brush, to get the lighter color. After I'd filled in all the sections, I let it dry, then cut it out with my scissors.

I had seen this tutorial by Jennifer McGuire on making your own shimmer paper, so I decided to give it a try on this card. I took a small piece of white cardstock, and applied Spun Sugar Distress ink to it, using the direct-to-paper method. While that was still wet, I spread some PearlEx Sparkle Gold pigment powder over it with a soft brush, then rubbed it with my finger to get a more even coverage. To set the powder, I sprayed water into the air with my mister bottle, and then waved the paper through the mist. Finally, when that had dried, I die cut it with a Lifestyle Crafts "Nesting Scallops" die.

For the background, I cut a piece of mint cardstock to 4x5.25". I used the "A2 Snowflakes" embossing folder by The Paper Studio to emboss just the top portion. I then stamped my greeting, from Hero Arts' "Very Merry Christmas" set, in Versamark below the embossing, and heat embossed that with Liquid Platinum. Then I inserted just the bottom portion of my panel into the folder, and embossed that. I scored a line along the bottom of the top portion and the top of the bottom portion, just to give the embossed areas a finished look.

I glued my crystal to the pink circle, and glued that in place on the background panel. I poked a hole at the top of the crystal, and threaded a holographic metallic thread by Coats through the hole and around the top of the panel, repeating that a few times. Finally, I taped the ends of the thread on the back. For the mat, I heat embossed the right and bottom edges of a 4.25x5.5" piece of white cardstock with Liquid Platinum. I adhered the card front to the upper left corner of my mat piece, then mounted that onto a white A2 card base.

I'm also entering this card in the following challenges:

a2z Scrapbooking's August challenge: "Texture"
A Blog Named Hero's "Metallic" challenge