Fleas Navidad!

Every year for Christmas, my mom & I send a gift card for Petsmart to Northeast Animal Shelter in Massachusetts. This is a no-kill shelter that we've supported for several years now. To make it a little more special, I always make them a card to put the gift card in.

I started by using a "Triple Step" card template from Hot off the Press to create my card base from red shimmer cardstock by Die Cuts with a View. Once I'd finished that, I stamped my images, from Hampton Art's "Furry Christmas" set, onto white cardstock, & colored them in with colored pencils. I colored in the dots and the middle of the star on the dog's present with a gold gel pen, & used a white gel pen to go over the dots on the cat's present box. Then I used the HOTP template to trace the cut lines for each panel. After cutting them out, I adhered them to their respective panels.

I traced the pattern for the main front panel on a piece of patterned paper from The Paper Studio's "Woodland Wonderland" 6x6" pad. I then cut that out and adhered it to my card base.

One of the greeting stamps in "Furry Christmas" was too small, and the other one was too big, so I had to get creative. The small greeting in the set says "Fleas on Earth." I took that and mentally ran with it, and finally came up with "Fleas Navidad." (A play on words for the Spanish greeting, "Feliz Navidad.") I die cut white cardstock with one of the "Labels Four" dies by Spellbinders, and scanned that into my computer. I opened that image in Photoshop, and used it to size & place my greeting, which I typed using a font on the computer.

I played around with what to put above & below the greeting, to fill up the empty space and balance the greeting a little better. I started by drawing paw prints with the Custom Shape tool in Photoshop, but that just wasn't doing it for me. I tried a bone & a fish, but that didn't seem right, either. So finally, I drew a dog and a cat, also with the Custom Shape tool. I copied each image layer, and flipped them horizontally so I had 2 dogs & 2 cats facing each other. I lined them up on the label image, and reduced the opacity so they didn't compete with the greeting. Finally, I printed all that directly onto my die cut label, and adhered it to the card front.

As a final touch, I added a couple of coats of clear Wink of Stella to the bow on the cat's present and the star on the dog's present. I also coated the star with Glossy Accents. Hopefully, the staff at the shelter will get a kick out of this. I'm sure they'll appreciate the gift card!