Season's Greetings

Yana Smakula had a lesson on Day 7 of "Holiday Style," which focused on "Shimmer & Shine" cards. Her card used the negative of a greeting die cut in a foil patterned paper background.

My version was actually a pretty simple card to do. I began by stamping the "Wood Plank Background," from My Favorite Things, on a piece of white cardstock using Delicata Golden Glitz ink. Once that had dried, I die cut Simon Says Stamp's "Season's Greetings" from the panel. That was when the real fun began!

In Yana's card, she had had just the negative space from die cutting the greeting as the front of her card, giving it a very modern look. Because of the relatively large open spaces in the letters in my greeting, and my wanting a more "traditional" effect, I wanted to replace the inner pieces of the letters into the negative space. First, I cut a piece of gold foil cardstock to 4.25x5.5", to use as my backer panel. I applied foam tape to the back of my main panel, adding several really tiny pieces around and between the letters. That was actually one of the most time-consuming parts of making this card! When I felt I had covered enough area to support the panel pretty completely, I removed the liner papers from the tape and adhered it to my gold foil panel.

When I'd die cut the greeting, I used a dryer sheet on the back of the panel, so the die cut pieces would stick to it, and I wouldn't lose any of them. I carefully peeled each piece up, and used my 2-way glue pen and tweezers to glue them all in place on the foil panel. The only piece I lost was from the middle "s" in "season's." No problem, though. I just trimmed the apostrophe piece (which I didn't need for this) to the approximate shape, and glued it in place! I will admit, the smallest pieces were not easy to maneuver into place and adhere without getting glue all over. But I think it was worth it in the end. All that I had left at that point to do was mount the card front to a white A2 card base. This will be going into my collection of holiday cards for my mom & me to send out this year.