Lily-by-Gilly

Hello and welcome. This week’s colour challenge at 52 Christmas Card Throwdown really had me thinking as green, brown and blue are not usually my go to colours for festive cards without the addition other colours, such as a splash of red. I’m so glad I embraced the challenge as I had so much fun getting inky playing with the debossed inky resist technique for this one…

First, I inked up the raised side of the embossing folder with versamark ink, then ran it through my bigshot.  This pushes the ink into the debossed areas on the back of the panel. I then heat embossed with white embossing powder – it’s not perfect as the versamark hit other areas too, but this only adds to the effect. I used several colours of both distress and distress oxide inks, smushing the ink onto my craft mat and misting with water before dipping the panel into the inks.  I don’t have a lot of distress inks so just used what I had – vintage photo for brown, tumbled glass for blue, and shabby shutters which is a lovely shade of green.

Once the panel was dry, I added some distress oxide inks in tea dye, tumbled glass and twisted citron.  Oxide inks are an opaque ink that sits on top of what is below, in contrast to the distress inks that sink into the card.  I must have been a little impatient adding the oxide inks before the panel was fully dry as the bottom corner oxidised a little too much for my liking. I tried to fix this by drying it with my heat gun and adding more distress ink, but whatever is in that oxide formula was preventing the ink from staying put.

As most crafters know, there are no mistakes in crafting – just opportunities for embellishment – so I covered the area I wasn’t so happy with a die cut circle of vellum, added a strip of whisper white card coloured with tumbled glass ink, and placed the die cut stag in early expresso card on top.  Vellum is notoriously difficult to adhere to projects without the glue showing, so I only added adhesive under the areas that were going to be covered by the card strip and the stag. I could have used a white card circle instead, but I liked that the vellum shows through some of the colours beneath. I stamped the sentiment from the Itty Bitty Christmas stamp set by Stampin Up using early espresso ink onto water colour card and tucked it under the stag. The panel was then adhered to an old olive base card and a sprinkling of blue glitter stars added.

I think this makes a good masculine festive card, even with the glittery stars.  There are several tutuorials on YouTube showing how to do the debossed inky resist technique, including Jennifer McGuire and Splitcoast Stampers, so why not take a look and give it a go?

I hope you’ve been inspired to join our challenge this week as we’d love to see what you make.

Enjoy your weekend.