This is the second card that I created for the demonstrator-only swap for the Sept. – Dec. mini catalog. This catalog in particular is always my favorite because I absolutely love to make Christmas cards. So when I signed up for the swap I definitely had to use one of the Christmas sets. I could have gone with a Christmas theme with the Rustic Crate set, but I wanted to showcase it’s usability for several seasons (you can see my card here). The Joy of Noel is all about Christmas! And since it includes dies that cut out the individual letters of NOEL, I was immediately smitten with the bundle. Mostly this card was simple to mass produce – I’ll explain a little later what made it a bit more effort. I stamped the bigger foliage stamp on the background paper to give some tone-on-tone effect, added some go-juss patterned paper at the bottom (you really should check out that paper!), added some ribbon, and a layer with the NOEL diecuts. I really love this set and how this card turned out. I’ll definitely be using this set to create a few different Christmas cards this year.
The one thing that made this card a bit more involved was the “NOEL” letters. They look like they are popped up and they are higher than expected. What’s unusual is that I didn’t use Dimensionals to pop up the letters. Instead what I did was I stamped and diecut the letters, and then I diecut two more sets of the letters from Basic White (unstamped) cardstock. I then glued together the three layers to create thicker letters. Finally, I used the negative that I diecut from as a guide for the placement of the letters to get them to line up properly. This all took a little bit more effort, but I’m very happy with the result.
I haven’t purchased their products, but I do enjoy the sketch challenges from the blog for My Favorite Things. That is one of the positives of the internet, it makes it possible to find a lot of inspiration and ideas. There are definitely downsides, but I won’t dwell on that here (I get to do it all the time in my day job). But whenever I can celebrate something, I’m glad to do so.
I really liked this sketch when I discovered it, and it was very easy for me to translate it into my card design. I chose to ignore the strip near the top with the challenge number, and they may have intended for something to be there as part of the design. I have no idea, and the best part… it doesn’t matter! I wasn’t participating in the challenge, just using the sketch to give me a kickstart on my creativity. Yay!
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