Day 16- Time to Shellabrate the Season!

Living in a coastal climate, I always love creative ways to make Christmas cards that fit that bring a touch of Florida into the design. In these two card examples that I demonstrated at my November Stampin’ Up!® workshop, I 

used the Sanded background stamp with a shell stamp from the Seaside set to create this simple and elegant card. The verse is appropriately from the Shellebrate stamp set which I used for the Surfin’ Snowman pull-up card. Tomorrow I will post another set of cards made with that cute set.

To recreate this:  Cut a piece of Naturals Ivory CS to 3-3/4" x 5". Stamp shell in versamark ink and use Gold Stampin’ emboss powder & heat tool to emboss the shell image. Ink Sanded background stamp with Versamark pad and colorize using chalk Stampin’ pastels in natural tones of mustard, cocoa, chocolate, carmel, moss and rust, or add others you like! The sponge daubers work great for this! Punch 1/16" hole in top right corner and insert mini gold brad. Mount layer onto More Mustard Cardstock. Tie chocolate chip taffeta ribbon around front panel and trim points. On a small scrap of chocolate chip cardstock, emboss verse in gold, tear bottom edge, drag over versamark pad and emboss edging in gold for a gilded effect. Bend top left corner down. Mount onto card front. Note: In the second card sample, I added some more colored pastels to the background, made a bow with ribbon, added embossing around edges of shell layer and adding more tearing to the verse. You can always use the same basic concept, change out ink colors, papers, ribbons, backgrounds to get a variety of looks, not only on this example, but on any project. Tip: The reason I embossed the shell first in gold was to avoid the gold embossing powder sticking to the versamark ink used with the pastels. So whenever you want to add embossing to a chalked background or stamped card, you have to plan to do the embossing first, unless you don't mind having some touches of embosssing in your background.

If you want to see the Stampin' Up! sets that will be retiring, click here to view. Order by Dec. 23rd and receive 10% off plus FREE shipping!!! You can order these directly from my website. They will no longer be available after Jan. 18th.