Christmas Cards - March 2014

I love Christmas trees! 
I collect them!  I have Christmas trees around the house all year long... we keep our tree up in the living room way too long (usually until just before Valentine's Day), but I don't care!  I just love Christmas trees!  They make me very happy.  Plus, when I look at these, I can hear Bing Crosby's song Mele Kalikimaka.  :)

I saw this technique in a simpler form and thought to give it more detail.

I especially like Christmas trees that have Merry Christmas in different languages.  At school, almost every year, I have the kids color a tree with the Merry Christmas sayings in the ornaments and turn it into a card for their parents, or a favorite grandparent.

The effect I was going for was glowing lights on the tree with this technique.  The original had just triangles of green with just the circular ornaments.  I had this stamp - and this is how I made these trees happen.

I used Garden Green cardstock, and stamped the trees in Garden Green.  Use a white gel pen to color in the stars, circles, squares, and triangles on each tree.  Dig out the pastels from your stash (come on, I know you have some!), and color over the white gel pen with the pastel chalks.  While you're in the middle of the technique, it doesn't look so, but when you're finished you can see the lights glowing on the Christmas trees!

In hindsight I should have embossed the red background, but the trees are so busy I decided to let them have the entire focus.

I used the Artisan punch on its side for the sentiment and scraps of the Garden Green as a frame.

Here you can see the inside of the card, and the envelope.  Remember the saying... "No naked envelopes!"