Merry Monday #274 Bits of Holiday Magic!

Happy Monday, friends! I'm so glad you've stopped by today! I have a fun card to share with you for this week's Merry Monday Christmas Challenge! I'm starting to realize how addicted to Christmas stamps I have become! LOL! I just ordered a few more new sets so it won't feel like a broken record around here! Ha ha!

Isn't this snowy scene beautiful? Nina has challenged us to make a Christmas card with snow. I guess snowflakes count as snow, right? I was planning on making something much different for this week's challenge, until I saw some absolutely gorgeous photos that my stamping friend Dawn Lusk posted on Facebook. They were photos that she took of ACTUAL snowflakes and one of them was placed on a beautiful pink/orchid sweater or scarf! I was completely inspired and wanted to incorporate that into my design for today! Thank you, Dawn!

To begin, I needed to recreate the sweater element for my card. I started by watercoloring a piece of 140 lb cold-pressed watercolor paper from Strathmore. I used my Kuretake Gansai Tambi watercolors to create the different colors. I love using my Pearl watercolors, but the colors are limited, so I chose to use these, but add the white pearl paint over the top that is included in the 36 color set. I love that I can make any of the colors with a pearlescent quality by adding that over the top! I did have some interesting patterns on the watercolor piece before I embossed it, so I may try a design like this again, but without the embossing so you can see the "fractals" that I created with paint, but mimicked the fractals on a snowflake. I spritzed it with Frost Shimmer Spray and then dried it using my heat tool. 

I set that aside and got to work on the snowflakes for the card. I grabbed a piece of cardstock that matched the background nicely and die cut the retired "Snowflake Medley" snowflakes and then heat embossed them with some old SU! powder called Hologram Highlights. I knew it would give the snowflakes a translucent and sparkly quality that I was hoping to achieve.

Once the watercolor panel was good and dry, I embossed it using on of my favorite embossing folders called Knitted from Richard Garay. I picked mine up at Hobby Lobby quite a while ago. I heat embossed the sentiment onto a strip of vellum using silver detail powder. Once it had cooled, I added it to a strip of glitter cardstock slightly larger than the vellum strip. It helped flatten it out and I was able to tape it with scotch tape tightly to the back.

I wanted to give the snowflakes a little bit more detail, so I added some lilac Nuvo Drops here and there on each snowflake. I did this AFTER they had been adhered to the watercolor piece. I used this same technique on this non-traditional CARD I made last year. It ended up being one of my favorite Christmas cards of the year!

The watercolor piece is adhered to an A2 cardbase using foam mounting tape for some added dimension. I also added a few GEMS here and there for even more sparkle! Thanks for fluttering by!