2006 Christmas card

Over the past couple of months I've shared some of the Christmas cards I made for troops, as well as the one I designed for a friend of mine. Well...here at last is *my* Christmas card for 2006. It is a tri-fold card, and if you visit this blog or my SCS gallery with any frequency you may recognize the design as combining the One Sheet Wonder (OSW) technique with that of one of the sketch challenges.

All products were by Stampin' Up! and I began by stamping up a full sheet of very vanilla cardstock with some of the images from Reindeer Print (2005 Holiday Mini) and the snowflake from Holiday Tag Time. Ink colors used are real red, certainly celery, always artichoke, more mustard and so saffron. The key to doing a OSW is not to be afraid to fill up the entire cardstock. When stamping the small snowflake, holly and greeting I stamped each two or three times before reinking so there would be subtle shading differences. This is what a sheet looked like after stamping, and before cutting:

I used certainly celery for the card base, cutting and folding for a normal 4-1/4" wide x 5-1/2" high card, then scored the front at 2-1/8" and folded it back towards the left hand side to create a tri-fold card.



Next, I used my Fiskars paper trimmer to cut 2" x 5-1/4" strips in real red, then cut the OSW pages to 1-7/8" x 5" -- I kept these pieces in order as I cut them so that, when I adhered the stamped vanilla pieces to the red panels, split images would match up on opposing panels (see example top right in next picture). I attached the vanilla strips to the red panels, working in pairs and with the inside edge of each panel flush so that they matched up when adhered to the certainly celery base (see bottom example of next pic).


At this time I also cut 1-1/2" strips of 1/4" wide red grosgrain ribbon, which were adhered about 2" from the top of the left hand side of the OSW strips.













Setting those aside, it was time to cut squares for matting. The very vanilla are 2" square, the certainly celery 2-1/4" square, and the real read 2-1/2" square. Trees from Reindeer Print were then stamped in center of very vanilla square using real red ink, then were mounted on the celery square, and then the red.










Next came the tricky part -- centering the image. Mono-adhesive was applied to the left side only of the square image, then centered on the card. This had to be done carefully to ensure that the mono did not stick to the right side of the card, or it would not open. Here is the final product: