With today being the 25th of July (and that means only 6 months until Christmas) I thought I would post a Christmas card. Not just any Christmas card either but a tropical one. The challenge this month over at WMS's Christmas Card Challenge is to use orange. How NON-traditional is that right. I laughed about it with my DH until he said something about fire. Then my wheels started running and I started to think the way I like for my students to think, outside-of-the-box. I started thinking about different Christmas card greetings and the one that kept jumping out at me was "warm winter wishes". Well you can't get any warmer than the tropical islands and that's when it hit me. Why not use my new stamp set love
My Island (MI) and create a tropical Christmas cards. What I lacked in orange paper I made up for in inks (Distress and copics). I started off with a Mojo Monday sketch before it took on a form of its own. To create the sunset on the top two back panels I used a sunray from PTI's Hello Sunshine set in Wild Honey and then sponged on Mustard Seed and Spiced Marmalade. For the bottom panel I used the barn boards from a PTI set stamped in Vintage Photo onto Kraft c/s. I stamped the distressed rectangle from the
MI set onto vanilla c/s in Wild Honey and then sponged over it in Spice Marmalade before I distressed the edges. Once my edges were roughed up I sponged some Walnut Stain to darken the edges. The island image was created by layering the stamped images. I frist stamped the distressed sunrays by inking up the image with Mustard Seed, Wild Honey, and Spiced Marmalade. Then I took the "ground" image and stamped it in Vintage Photo as well as the small cluster of palms. The cute little hut was stamped last in Walnut Stain. I then sponged the edges of it in all of the same colors before I roughed up the edges. Once the Edges were distress I sponged on a little more of the Walnut Stain. This stamped layer was then popped up over the rectangle backing piece. I then decided that you can't have a tropical winter scene without some tropical flowers so out came my
Free Spirit set and the cluster of flowers found there. I stamped them twice onto vanilla c/s and colored them in with several shades of orange in my copic collection. The large middle flower was cut out from the second stamping and popped up over the first one. Since the colors and images alone didn't make for an obvious Christmas card I new the perfect set to use to get my message across:
Say It Loud Winter Holiday. I used the large 'warm' and paired it with the smaller 'winter wishes'. To make sure the sentiment could be read I ended up embossing it on to some clear acetate in white. I wish I could have used a softer, not as bright color, but all I have is white and black. Black didn't work at all so white it was. I stamped it onto acetate so that it would look like it was floating on the wooden beams (the top part is glued under the island image/mat). In the end I really had lots of fun with this challenge and can't wait to see what next month's will bring.
