Austin: I enjoyed making this card it was quite hard but I enjoyed making it. I love the watercolour background and the mountains this is an awesome card.
I really like the skating people, looks so cute and I love the sentiment in silver, it really stands out.
The glitter paper is so neat and cute and makes the card shine. Looks so gorgeous
Sally: Our mum came up with the concept for this card. She comes up with these conceptual ideas & then it's really fun trying to turn them into cards.
I especially love the colours on this. I gave our mum Pinterest & got her to pick a colour swatch of how she wanted the animals coloured & I think she did a pretty good job, they look perfect on this background, so well done mum 😊
This is actually a pretty simple card, just a touch of colouring, watercolouring & layering. It sounds long and difficult but there's just a lot of steps, each one is actually very short & quick to do. The longest thing (by far) was the colouring.
So for that colouring I stamped these elements from the Hello Bluebird Skating Party stamp set in Memento Rich Cocoa & then coloured them using copics (there's a clip of it on our Instagram saved stories). I stuck to a deep burgundy, a rich teal, a kind of grey mint & a touch of a burnt orange plus neutrals for the colour palette which is the palette our mum found. It's a bit different from what Austin & I usually pick for a Christmas card but we actually love how it worked out.
Then whist Austin die cut them with the matching dies I stamped the trees from the Simon Says Stamp Woodland Whimsy stamp set & fussy cut them.
We then did the smooshing distress ink watercolour technique, you know where you stamp the ink pad onto a crafting mat, spritz it with water & then smoosh the watecolour paper on top of the ink? There are tonnes of videos using it, like this one, or this one, or even this one. We used tumbled glass, stormy sky, shaded lilac and salted ocean Distress mini inks.
Then once the background had dried we blended on a mountain using a stencil made using the Impressions Obsession Mountain Landscape layers die set & some faded jeans Distress ink, then I went over it with a wet brush to give it a watercolour look.
Then we die cut a pond out of Lawn Fawn Pixie Dust sparkle cardstock using the Hello Bluebird Skating Pond scene die & a small white snow hill with the Mama Elephant Landscape trio die set.
Honesly, however much I like the idea of the hello bluebird skating pond scene die it just feels...it doesn't quite work for me. I don't love the bottom of the pond, the trees feel clunky & it's harder than you would think to piece it all back together, especially if you have variable fine motor control (me) and an excitable crafter (Austin) bouncing around, desperate for the card to be done. I did however really like just using the pond like we did on this card. I'll definitely be using it like this when we use it in the future. Plus I like that it opens up more ways to use it, I hate a crafting product I can only use one way, it feels wasteful.
Anyway, after that it was pretty much just a matter of assembly. Trees onto background, ice-y glitter pond onto that & white hill on top of that. And on top of that the elements I coloured right at the beginning.
Finally sentiment which was a Winter die from Simon Says Stamp cut out of silver foil cardstock and a wishes from some of those pre-made sentiment strips by Simon Says Stamp.
That was a way longer explanation than even I expected! In the end though it's a great card & our Mum said it turned out better than she imagined which makes it all worth while 😊
Do you ever have friends or family describe to you a card idea that you then have to figure out how to make? Or see a picture & think how can I recreate that?
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