Peace Joy & Love

The current challenge theme at Christmas Card Throwdown's blog is to use rainbow colors. They want to see at least 5 colors. But I went ahead & used them all!

I cut a piece of Canson XL Mixed Media Paper to 4x5.25". After marking the vertical center, I used one of the stamps from Hero Arts' "Joy to the World" set to help me decide where I wanted the baseline of my design to be. I marked that, and used my T-square ruler and a pencil to draw a light line across my panel. I stamped my center image in Versamark ink first, using my lines as a guide, and heat embossed it with white embossing powder. Then I rotated my stamp 180 degrees, and stamped again to the right and against my first image, also lining up the top & bottom points. After heat embossing that, I stamped a third image to the right of the second, and so on. When I had finished stamping to the right edge of my panel, I did the left side in the same fashion.

After my design was completely stamped & heat embossed, I masked off the top & bottom of my panel with Frog Tape butted against the stamped lines. I smooshed Distress inks (Festive Berries, Carved Pumpkin, Mustard Seed, Twisted Citron, Peacock Feathers, Blueprint Sketch, & Wilted Violet) on my non-stick craft mat. I used a wet brush to pick up each color & apply it to my panel. I washed my brush between colors, to avoid creating mud. Once I had applied all my colors and they were blended, I dried the panel with my heat tool. I used a dry paper towel to buff the color off the embossing.

For the main part of my greeting, I used Winnie & Walter's "Peace" die. I centered it on my panel, and die cut it, making sure to keep both the positive & negative pieces. After matting my panel with a light blue cardstock, I used the positive die cut word as a guide to glue down the inner pieces of the letters to my background. I applied Stick It adhesive to both sides of a piece of black craft foam, and die cut the "Peace" again from that. I adhered the colored die cut to the top of the foam word, and popped that into place on my card front. To finish the greeting, I stamped the "joy & love" words from Hero Arts "Christmas Crystals" set (discontinued) in Versafine Onyx Black ink onto a scrap of vellum. I clear heat embossed that, and cut it into a narrow strip. I angled both ends to match the angle of the heat embossed design on my panel, and glued it in place. Finally, I added narrow black strips above & below my watercolored strip, and adhered the panel to a white A2 card base.

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

Dies R Us #77: "Die Cut Sentiment as the Focus"
a2z Scrapbooking's July Challenge: "Anything Goes"
613 Avenue Create #199: "Anything Goes"
Die Cut Divas: "Christmas in July"