Holly Wreath

Hi everybody.  Well, here we are nearly at the end of October and the clocks going back this comng weekend...ugh... hate the thought of all those dark nights!  I decided that I need to crack on with my Christmas cards so here is one to show you today.  I used a couple of new dies which I bought fairly recently, both Sue Wilson ones, the Snowflake Mini Striplet and the Holly Branch.

For the holly I decided on slightly unconventional Christmas colours using the marbling technique with snippets of black and white card and White and Bronze Acrylic Paint which worked reasonably well.  The colours turned out a little muted, obviously the white paint in there wasn't going to do anything on the white card, so I added some more bronze with a brush.  At this point I though that it might be nice to have some totally Bronze coloured pieces to mix in, so I painted some white snippets with the Bronze paint.    

I then made the background using another snippet of white card, and die cut the striplet three times across the card and attached this to the white square base card.  I found a left over snippet of black which had been cut with a circle die some time ago, I keep a plastic box with all sorts of bits in.  I heat embossed a sentiment on to it using some WOW Copper Metallic Embossing Powder.  I then attached this to the centre of the card.

To finish I die cut the holly branches and cut them in half, and then using Cosmic Shimmer White Pearl PVA I made the berries.  They weren't totally successful as the holly die berries are like the leaves in that they are open, so the beads of PVA went slightly flat as they fell through the holes a bit, but there were too many of them to use gems.  I then adhered them round the circle.

Thank you for dropping by today, and I'll be back soon.

I am entering the following challenges:

Pixie's Crafty Workshop - Week 252 where we use up snippets of paper and card etc.
Simon Says Wednesday Challenge - Anything Goes.
Happy Little Stampers October Christmas Challenge - Embossing (I heat embossed the sentiment).
Happy Little Stampers October Anything Goes with Dies.