You've Got Happy Mail !

Hello Everyone

It is time for a new challenge at Anything But Cute and our host this month is the wonderful Niki of Pawsitively Creative Crafts. The theme is 'You've Got Happy Mail' and Niki says she would love to see some mixed media Christmas cards, ATCs or whatever papercrafts you are mailing to a friend, inspired by the Spirit of Christmas.

I love giving and receiving cards from friends and family, especially those we do not see as often as we would like.  For me the Spirit of Christmas is all about family and friends and less about gifts. I love non traditional colours for Christmas and blue and white are my all time favourites.

(Apologies for the darkness of my photos, the light here is so poor at the moment)

     

I was inspired by Niki's wonderful challenge to make this card for a special person in my life.  I used lots of crackle, texture paste and a hint of sparkle to create my 'Happy Mail' card.

I took a piece of heavily patterned paper (this is a great way to use up patterned paper that you may not like) and I painted the whole piece with a mix of DecoArt paints in Primary Cyan and Titanium White.  The paints are pigment rich and you only need a small amount of the dark blue to create a beautiful soft blue.

Once the paint had dried (it only takes moments) I gave the whole piece a coat of  DecoArt Weathered Wood Crackle Medium.  I applied it quite thickly with an old credit card.  If you are in a hurry, use a thin coat, but I wanted quite large crackles.  I left this overnight to dry thoroughly.

The next day I applied a thin coat of the Primary Cyan and Titanium mix again and then some beautiful crackles appeared.  I took a small paint brush and dipped it into a watery mix and also some plain white and flicked these over the entire piece, to create a kind of snow effect.

To create the frame I applied some coarse modelling paste (purchased from Indigo Blu) to a Tim Holtz die cut frame and left it to dry.  It is an amazing texture paste that dries to a beautiful white finish, it would be wonderful to create snow effects.  It is the same paste that I used for my church project (if you missed it and want to see it you can find it HERE, it was my first DT piece for Anything But Cute).

The Poinsettia and leaf embellishments are Tim Holtz dies, the Poinsettia was cut from some blue patterned paper from my stash.  I added some Stampendous Shabby Blue and Shabby White Embossing Powders for added texture.

To create the silver ball in the middle I coated a plain silver bauble with Cosmic Shimmer dries clear glue and dipped the whole thing into some Stampendous Silver crushed glass glitter.

The sentiment is a Tim Holtz stamp which was stamped with Wendy Vecchi's Cornflower Blue Archival Ink.

To finish off I added some white baubles, gauze, some dyed vintage seam binding and a few pearls from my stash.  I also used some beautiful Maja Design paper to mat onto my card before adding my crackled layer.

I hope you like my card and that you feel inspired to join in with us at Anything But Cute, we would love to see what you have created for a friend.  I hope you will pop over to see what my talented teamies have created for your inspiration too.

 Thanks so much for looking, I hope to see you again soon.

I have, rather belatedly realised I could enter this into Craft Stamper's latest challenge - Take a Technique, Sharing the Season - details can be found HERE.

Hugs, Anne xxx