Hello and welcome. This week’s theme challenge at 52 Christmas Card Throwdown is “Christmas cup”. In my stamp library, I have A Nice Cuppa stamp set I’d purchased from Stampin’ Up a while back and never used – I’d loved it when I saw it in the catalogue, but once I owned it there never seemed to be the right occasion to use it – such a shame. So this was finally the perfect occasion to ink it up.
I took my inspiration from this card by Kelly and used Ardyth‘s LIMES technique to change it up and make it mine. LIMES stands for – List (list the elements on the inspiration project), Include (include the elements you like), Modify (change and adapt), Exclude (omit some elements), and Spin (put your own spin on the project to change it up).
I loved the colour combo of light blue and red together, all those pretty snowflakes, the glitter and the sentiment stamped in red at the bottom, so I included those. I modified the layout and changed the panel from an oval to a rectangle, excluded the green colour, the polka dot background and the coloured embellishments, and my spin was to change the die cut shapes from 2 cupcakes to 3 cups, and change the snowflake die cut borders, top and bottom, to embossed snowflakes on the sides …
For the pale blue background and the stamped cups I used soft sky card and ink, and added touches of pool party for a change in tone using a stampin’ write marker pen.
The cups were die cut using the matching dies. The sentiment was stamped in real red ink on whisper white card using the Christmas Pines stamp set, also by Stampin’ Up.
I stamped a pattern, using an image from the Christmas Pines stamp set, to one of the cups and it fitted perfectly across the top. I also stamped the heart image from A Nice Cuppa set to the red die cut cup and embossed with white embossing powder. It didn’t look the same shade of white to me as the other white elements on the card, so to fix this, I added crystal effects to the heart and sprinkled with dazzling diamonds glitter.
The inspiration card had glitter here and there, so I also added a little glitter to the ends of the Tim Holtz snowflake die cuts. I changed the placement of the 3 snowflake die cuts a little compared to the inspiration card, just to balance it a little. I embossed the front of a white 6″ x 6″ base card with the Flurry of Snowflakes 3D embossing folder by Spellbinders, which is my new favourite. I love that you also see the debossed pattern on the inside of the card.
I hope you’ve been inspired to join our challenge this week – we’d love to see what you make.
Enjoy your weekend
Lily-by-Gilly 