In the Spotlight: Season's Greetings + Bonus Tag

Hello friends! I'm sharing a holiday card that is featured in today's Papertrey Ink newsletter and I thought I'd share it here as well with a few more details about the process AND I had a few sprigs and berries left so I am sharing a bonus tag that I made with the leftovers!

This is the finished card, but in the next series of photos, I will share step-by-step instructions on how I created this Christmas design.

To begin, I die cut and colored all of the pieces I used for my wreath. I used the Into the Blooms: Holly Dies, Into the Blooms: Christmas Sprigs dies, the berry branches included in the Christmas Bouquet stamp set, and finally, the wreath from the Forever Snowflake Frame Die. I used an assortment of Distress Oxide Ink Pads for the die cuts and then stamped the berry branches using Pure Poppy, Scarlet Jewel, and Cocoa Bean ink.

Next, I hot foiled a 4 by 5 1/4 inch piece of Soft Stone cardstock with silver foil. Use the coolest setting on your machine for 15 seconds; this Fanciful Snowflake Hot Foil Plate always provides amazing results without a lot of fussing and guessing which setting!

Glue the wreath to the foiled panel and attached the panel to a white A2 top-folding card base with foam squares.

Arrange Holly, berries, and pine sprigs around the wreath frame using liquid glue and foam squares. Add the stamped./die cut sentiment from the Christmas Your Way stamp set and then heat emboss the accent sentiment using silver powder on a black strip of cardstock.

Finally, add the finishing touches like white puff embossing powder and glitter! I also added black detail to the berries using a fine-tip Sharpie marker. 

Here's the finished card! I forgot to mention that I added some ribbon "tails" to the bottom of the wreath using the Bows Galore die set. I did rip it in half at the top so I could arrange them the way I wanted.

I chose to stamp the Season's Greetings sentiment on the same Soft Stone cardstock as the background to keep the wreath's openness. I used the black sentiment strip to add contrast.

I don't normally mix stamped images and Into the Blooms die cut pieces, but I really felt that the berry sprigs worked nicely with this design.

I like starting off with white cardstock for die cuts like this because it allows me to create built-in "shine" and realism by keeping portions white, like I did on the berries and leaves. 

Since I had some die cut pieces left over AND a few sentiments from the November release, I decided to have some fun and make a bonus tag.

The Happy Holidays sentiment is from the Vintage Holiday Flair stamp set and is one of my favorites from the new release.

I also added one of the postal images from the Deliver by December 25th stamp set and is part of this week's Flash Sale.

For the tag, I used Wow! White Sparkle embossing powder and I absolutely LOVE the result! As you can see in this photo, I went one step further on the berries and added some details with a white gel pen to give them a bit more realism. I gave the entire tag a couple flicks of white paint splatter and called it done! Thanks for fluttering by!