July Rudolph Day Card 1

Hi everybody.  Phew, I just made this month's deadline by the skin of my teeth!  I have to admit I am struggling a bit with producing Christmas cards and not feeling terribly inspired, but I have done my best.  I decided to have a bit of a play with inks and an Indigoblu - Large Snowflake stamp and also a small snowflake from a set by Claritystamp - Winter Wonderland.  You can buy just the tree, deer and snowflake on their own too, but I bought the set with the background as well.

This first card was made using a hexagon die as the starting point.  I used a set of Xcut Nesting Hexagons dies, and using the largest die I cut one out of a snippet of white card, and then stamped and heat embossed the Large Snowflake stamp using WOW Sparkling Snow EP.  I used several colours of Distress Inks - Tumbled Glass, Peacock Feathers and Picked Raspberry, and blended them together randomly.  Obviously the picked raspberry becomes more purple when covered with the blue.

I needed a slightly bigger hexagon frame, so I made a template by drawing lines up and through each of the six points of the hexagon and then joined them up.  I think this was approximately 1/2" bigger.  I then stuck the hexagon die in the middle and drew round the inside, and cut away the middle to leave the frame which was just wide enough to cover the outside edges of the snowflake.  I did find enlarging the hexagon rather time consuming and fiddly but luckily it worked ok.  I cut the frame from the template using a nice bright blue cardstock.  I covered this frame with the Claritystamp snowflake using Peacock Feathers ink and heat embossed with Clear EP.  This has to be done very quickly before the distress ink dries.  I then mounted the frame over the Indigoblu snowflake.

I made the final layer from a dark navy cardstock by holding the shape already made over the top very firmly and cutting.  I made sure that the final shape was the right size to fit my card.  I decorated this with the small snowflake again stamping and heat embossing using the WOW Sparkling Snow EP.

I mounted the framed snowflake on to this layer and offset it..  Finally I blended Peacock Feathers and  Memento - Nautical Blue round the edge of the card, and stamped the snowflake using Peacock Feathers, second generation ink to add a little extra texture, but unfortunately it doesn't show up very well in the photo.  I finished by adding some dots of Perfect Pearls to the snowflake for added interest.  I don't think this would be a good card to batch make as I would probably still be making them this time next year ...lol

The details of the second card are on a separate post below.

I am entering the two cards in the following challenge:

Rudolph Day Challenge July 2014 -  enter two Christmas cards.