Happy Christmas

Hi there everybody.   Here is a card I made after seeing something similar over at Heather Telford's bits & pieces.  I only found her blog relatively recently and on looking through some of her posts you can see what wonderful work she produces.  I looked at the video tutorial she made and couldn't wait to have a go.  I used the tree from a freebie set from Penny Black which I got recently with a magazine, and although more of an indoor tree I thought it would probably work OK.

 Now it is no way as good as hers and it is similar as there isn't a lot of different ways to do snow and trees, but I hope she wouldn't consider this too much of a copy.  I cut a piece of copy paper with the shape for the snow, and the moon I cut using a circle die, cut the inside of the die to make it a bit smaller, pencilling the shape on to a 'post it' note and cutting out.  I used watercolour paper this time as I wanted to make it wetter and this does allow you to wet with a spray where ordinary card disintegrates much more easily.  I used  a brush and some water with my Distress Inks in  Tumbled Glass and Faded Jeans to build up the sky.  The trees were stamped with Adirondack - Bottle.  I actually spritzed the stamp with a bit of water before stamping so it blurred a bit and then went over again when dry with the same colour without the added water and on one or two I used a bit of Black Soot over the top instead of Bottle.   I did have a bit of a problem with the copy paper getting too wet and transferring the green  in several places.  I did try lifting the colour out with lots of water on the brush and a tissue which worked a little, but I just had to incorporate these in to the design as best I could.  If the tree looked a bit too thin I used a little extra Bottle ink with a brush and water to make the foliage more dense.  I used some more of the blues round the trees to give the appearance of the trees sitting in snow hollows and blurred lines of blue to give the snow depth.  I think this worked a bit but Heather's is fantastic.

I finished by stamping the sentiment and added some Perfect Pearls for the falling snow.  I think my blobs are a bit too regular.  Her brush and masking fluid gives a much more random effect.  Overall I was pleased with the way it turned out, but please if you don't know Heather and have never seen her work do go and take a look as you will be blown away by it.

After photographing it I decided that as it was what I considered to be my best and most creative card, artistically speaking, of the season,  I put a new sentiment tag over the top making it more personal and sent it to our son.  I didn't bother to take another photo though so this is it prior to the sentiment change.  

I would like to say a big thank you to all my lovely followers and fellow bloggers who I have come to know in the last fifteen months and hope that you all have a lovely Christmas, and for those that don't celebrate, an enjoyable break, and that 2015 will be happy, healthy and fulfilling. 

Pat x