Friday Feature - Christmas cards

Hi, it's Melody here.  I meant to get my post up last night, ready to go live around midnight, but my card just wasn't working for me. It just seemed to be missing something, but I'm going to show it to you anyway along with the second one, which I like.  Then, after I finished the second card, I went to take photos and found that my camera had a dead battery, so I had to wait for it to recharge. 

I've been seeing cards with some cute fun trees made from a folded half circle.  I've seen instructions using a pattern, but that was a little tricky to do.  I was really happy when I found one that can be done without a pattern and is really easy.  Because there is no pattern, it can also be made any size you want.  Rather than reinvent the wheel so to speak, I'm just going to give you a link to the tutorial that I used.  You may need to join this site to view the tutorial, but it's free. 

folded christmas tree

For my background, I made a stencil with some clear packaging, using the Tim Holtz tattered poinsettia Sizzix Bigz die.  I'm not sure why, but when I ran the plastic through the die cutter, it split and I had to use some clear packaging tape to fix it, but it still worked fine.  Then I used my stencil to sponge peeled paint distress ink on my card stock.  I love the look it gave me. 

I really didn't like all the empty space on the sentiment panel, so that was the biggest change I made. 

This one is so much more balanced and I like the paper better than the bright red. 

I made my trees using ivory card stock.  One is sponged with peeled paint and the other with vintage photo distress ink.  On the second card, I used the star portion of punchinella stencil with a damp sponge for a very subtle pattern on the trees.  Some details were added with a black marker. 

On card one, I used red card stock and on the second, some pattern paper from Pink Paislee.  I also used only half of the styled labels die cut on card two and really like that one much better. 

Some of the products used can be purchased from Outlaw Women Scrapbook Emporium.