This week at Christmas Card Throwdown is their "Pillar Tower Card" theme challenge. I had to look up how to make one, and found a good tutorial on Splitcoaststampers (which, unfortunately, I can't find now!). I decided to be a little extra on this one & use die cut trees for my panels rather than rectangles. Even with having to figure out how to make that work, this card didn't really take all that long.
I made a mock-up first with just scrap paper to see if my idea would work. Thankfully it worked without any difficulties. I began the actual card by choosing 7 patterned papers from an old pad from The Paper Studio. (My paper was single-sided, so I needed to glue my papers back-to-back to have patterns on both sides.) Two of the papers I actually found in my (ahem - vast) scraps collection, but for the rest I sadly had to cut into "virgin" sheets. I'm sure I'll use the large leftovers for something, though!
Once I cut my papers to size, I die cut each one, plus a piece of cream cardstock, with one of the "Nested Fir Trees" from Scrapbook.com. I used one of the cut trees from my mock-up as a pattern, & cut a small section off 3 of the trees. I glued those back-to-back with 3 uncut trees, & then used scissors to cut the uncut trees down. I just figured this would be easier than trying to cut everything first & then possibly have the straight edges not line up perfectly due to miscuts.
I made my pillar from a scrap of Bazzill Butter Mints cardstock. I cut it a little shorter than the full height of my card, since the trees obviously weren't rectangular & I didn't want my pillar to stick out at the top & bottom. I scored the 4-1/2 x 3-1/2" panel every 1" along the long side, folded & burnished along the score lines, then added glue to the 1/2" tab at the one end to glue the panel into a hollow rectangular prism shape. I was able to glue my trees to that, lining up the straight edge of each with one edge of the pillar.
After I cut the left section off my cream tree, I stamped a greeting from the "A Holy Holiday" by Paper Smooches (discontinued). (Having the side piece cut off made it much easier to line everything up in my MISTI stamp positioning tool.) I glued that to the last (uncut) patterned paper tree, cut off the excess as for the others, & glued that to my pillar. While I would have liked to have a star at the top, I couldn't make that work. (Believe me, I tried!) So this first Christmas card for our personal stash is done!
I'm also entering this card in the following challenges:
Paper Funday Challenge #78: "Anything Goes" (not playing the optional twist)
