Christmas Card Club - Cards 02/2020

Hello Everyone,

It was my turn to choose a theme for today's Christmas Card Club challenge - a difficult task but after much inner debate, not to mention more than a little help from Margaret, I opted for 'holly and/or ivy'.

And because my goal for this week is to concentrate on stash busting all the supplies for today's cards are not new - check out my post for Wednesday to see the boxes I'm working from.  I managed to make four altogether, two with holly and two with ivy.

The bottom panel on this one is a leftover piece from a masterboard I created autumn last year using lots of paint, leaf stamps, ink, stencils and texture past. The matting for the holly sprays and greeting was cut from scraps of glitter card. I had to cheat and use two snippets, butted up together, for the greeting.

The topper for this one is the last scrap from another masterboard, created way back in 2018. The background is made up of sponged inks. It was overstamped with two of my favourite Penny Black stamps , Winter Bough and Winter Berries in shades of green and gold. The die-cut holly spray was made from snippets of green and red cardstock.

The background piece, if I remember correctly, was made using a technique that involved embossing wax paper which was then ironed on to a white card base to create a resist for ink. The backgrounds on the next two cards were created in the same way.

The backgrounds were almost pretty enough to leave as is but, of course, the challenge called for some ivy so I stamped up some narrow scraps of white cardstock with trails of ivy. For the blue one I used a stamp from the Have a Holly Jolly Christmas set - the same one used for the green card above - and Memento Danube Blue ink. And I used my very first stamp - bought in 1995 - for the red one. This time I embossed the ivy trails with gold powder. In truth, there's not a lot of difference between the two stamped images - I just have a special fondness for the old wood-mounted one. The edges of  the panel are embossed in gold too. The ivy trails on both cards are decorated with tiny gems.

That's it from me for today's CCC challenge. This brings my total for this year to five already - not bad!

I'm also submitting one of these cards to Pixie's Snippets Playground - Challenge #369 - I'm not sure which one yet as I've used a bunch of snippets in the making of them.

I hope you will pop over to see what my teammates have created for today's theme. You'll find a list of their names and links on my right sidebar - as always they are so much more creative than I will ever be.