Colourful Christmas Cards

Hello everyone, it's time for another weekly post on the Chocolate Baroque Challenge Blog, and I am helping to provide part of the inspiration this week in the form of a tutorial.

I have created a set of Christmas notelets, along the same lines of my earlier floral cards for a previous colour challenge:

You can adapt the instructions to use any colours or stamps that you like, making the cards really versatile. If you check back to my previous post, you will see that I used Brushos rather than Distress Inks, so try using different water based mediums for these cards, and experiment with the effects that you can achieve for the backgrounds, but most of all, have fun and enjoy yourselves.

Materials:

Distress Inkpads: Squeezed Lemonade, Ripe Persimmon, Wilted Violet
Archival Plum inkpad
Versafine Onyx Black inkpad
Smooth Watercolour paper
Cream linen card
Selection of Christmas stamps and sentiments


Instructions:

Cut six strips of watercolour paper 5.5cms wide and 10.5cms long.
Colour each strip with a mixture of the three colours of Distress Ink, blending them where they meet. Spritz the panels with water if desired and dry with a heat gun.
Stamp the images using Plum Archival ink, and add the sentiments using Versafine Onyx Black ink.
To make the cards, cut two pieces of A4 linen card into three, approxinately 9.8 cms wide.
Fold the strips in half, at the 10.5cms point, scoring the fold to give a neat crease. Round the four corners of the card if desired.
Adhere the coloured panels to the linen cards.

For extra Christmas sparkle, you could choose to use gold embossing and add a bit of glitter to areas of the stamped images. These cards will be great for batch cards if you have lots of cards to make.

I used stamps from Christmas Flourish, Christmas Song, Fat Robin, Frosty Trees, and Stained Glass Christmas.

Thanks for stopping by, xx

Blue Christmas

Hello Folks, I'd like to show you a coupe of cards using the newly released stamp sets fron Chocolate Baroque

My first card uses the Santa Baby stamp set. I wanted to use the sleigh flying through the air pulled by a reindeer, and so I looked through my older christmas stamp sets and found the perfect match on the Damask Reindeer stamp set. I stamped both of the images onto a piece of smooth watercolour paper, and then covered them with a mask. I also added a circle mask at this point. I coloured the background with a variety of blue Distress Inks, graduating to a deep purple at the bottom of the page. Around the circle, I added some yellow, to create a glowing effect. I spritzed the background with water to create a starry feel to the background, and added a little bit of Perfect Pearl spray for some extra shimmer.

I removed the masks, and coloured the images with Distress markers and a water brush. I stamped a tree from the Stained Glass Christmas stamp set along the bottom of the background, using Cottage Ivy Memento Ink and clear embossing powder. I added some grey shading to the moon, and stamped a sentiment taken from the Christmas Magic clear stamp set using black ink.

I have also created a card using the A Child is Born stamp set. I stamped the corner snowflake stamp around the edges of some watercolour paper using white embossing powder, and filled in the gaps with one of the smaller snowflakes to create a frame. I created a watercolour background using lots of blue toned gelatos. I blended them with my fingers and lots of water to get a soft effect. I added a touch of Chipped Sapphire Distress Ink around the edge. Once I was finished, I buffed the snowflakes with a piece of kitchen towel, so that they were nice and bright.

 I stamped the angel onto a separate piece of card, and coloured the image with pencils. Finally, I added the word 'Joy' to the background.

 My Team mates have some beautiful inspiration for you over the coming month on the Design Team Blog so please keep checking back. Thanks for stopping by, xx