Belated Xmas Cards x3

Belated Xmas Cards x3

I was out of the country and didn't get a chance to post these holiday cards! 

and a close up of the shaker and paper trees

                                 

My red card uses Simon Says Stamp's Stained Glass greetings. I heat embossed them using Lime Green Tinsel Embossing Powder from Ranger, along with a small "wishing you" in Alabaster White Embossing Powder from Brutus Monroe. 

The forest background stamp is from Impression Obsession and embossed in the same Lime Green powder. I will be using this again in different colors with a black background as it looks great.

My shaker card was a lot more time consuming.. First I prepared several sheets of green paper to cut with my tree dies (from Simon Says Stamp). I used some green sparkle felt, a sheet of metallic green paper, a sheet of green shine paper from ACMoore and lastly, a paper that I made myself using several sprays from Lindy's Stamp Gang. The spray adds a lot of glitter, and I used a few shades of green as I was cutting a bunch of trees from the paper and wanted them to be varied. 

I then worked on the shaker part. First, I cut the tree in the middle. I chose this shape because it was big enough where the parts could shake around, but also had some straight lines too- I would later surround the back with foam tape and the straight lines made it a bit easier to deal with. Anyway, after cutting the tree cutout, I used a snowflake embossing folder on the paper. Then, I glued a piece of acetate on the back of the paper. Then, I surrounded the perimeter with 2 layers of foam tape. Then, I filled the middle with shaker bits. Then, I added a layer of acetate on the back to seal it in. I prefer to do this so that I can then take the whole piece of paper, turn it upside down and stick it exactly where I want to on my card base. If you want to skip this step, you can lay the cardbase upside down on your foam tape, but it probably won't be lined up perfectly straight... Good luck though! I think the extra 2 inches of acetate is well worth it- I actually just used leftover wrapping from some packages I had laying around. 

The last step was some glitter stickle drops in the middle of the snowflakes. I made a few of these to hand out, so I varied them a bit, but they all followed these steps. 

Hope everyone had an awesome holiday!