Winter Pine Branches and Berries

Hi all.  I'm sorry I haven't been around much lately but have been so busy with other things this past two or three weeks that posting has had to take a back seat.  I have managed to keep visiting though and looking at all your beautiful Christmas cards.  Everything has calmed down now and we went out yesterday to get the last food shopping so today we will be able to relax.

This was the card I made and sent to our DS in Australia.  He has received it now so thought I would show it.  Last year I was sad that for some reason he didn't get it until after Christmas but so pleased it arrived on time this year.

This was created using a card I found over here as my inspiration, made by Heather Telford, and as I don't have the stamp I decided to just paint it as a more or less direct CASEing of it.  For those that don't know Heather she does do the most amazing work and is just so talented at watercolouring,  and if you visit her using the link above you will see what I mean.  I used very few lines and just went for it, and I was fairly pleased with the result but wish I had made the sky a stronger blue to give more contrast.  I was having trouble coming up with something and time was pressing as I new the last dates for posting were imminent, and thought that the foliage and berries would work, though I did wonder if the finished piece might look a bit plain and uninteresting.

I used my watercolour paints and I also did some spattering with white acrylic paint and added some white gel pen snow on the branches and in amongst the foliage.  I heat embossed the sentiment with WOW Silver Metallic Embossing Powder.  I then mounted it on to dark green card and added it to a 6" square white base card  on which I embossed some snow using a SSS Snowfall stencil.  It doesn't show up much in the photo unfortunately.

Thank you for visiting and I hope you are all prepared and looking forward to the festivities.