Little Miracles

I'm super tickled that the "ticket corners" trick Mom & I shared at Top Tip Tuesday last week won their Top Tipper prize! We're such a great team (and we look & sound so alike). We're gonna have to figure out a way to share the prize, which is 3 digis from Karen's Doodles. I couldn't wait to hear back from Karen, though, and bought her First Taste of Snow to use for a Christmas card along with a ticket sentiment from When the Scrap Hits the Fun (Marion's blog). Her tickets helped inspire our "ticket corners" tip, so this card is sort of a celebration. It has lots of ticket corners!

Marion recently posted the loveliest Christmas-themed ticket -- please take a moment to check out her incredible shaker card -- and I totally lucked out that this week's colourQ combo includes the purple of the ticket. I was blown away by Julia's decidedly nontraditional Christmas card, and decided to use the bright colourQ combo as a cue for the Xmas in July challenge at Creative Inspirations. I'm also entering this into the Faith theme at the 2011 Christmas Card Challenge, and used the fab circle-and-rectangles sketch from Paper Cupcakes Magic Monday.

I kinda started this story at the end, because my first thought for this card came from Helen's Make your Own Backing Papers (BP) trigger for the Christmas/Holiday Card Club at Stampin' Dymonz Scrap Shack. I took the super-easy route of stamping & heat-embossing a snowflake to create my papers: I used white powder on the white paper, transparent yellow powder on the yellow, and clear powder on the green. The inside green piece isn't heat-embossed, just stamped with watermark ink. It's difficult to see the embossing in the photo on the right but if you click on it, it will enlarge & you can see more detail.

I had terrible fun coloring the image, and it just screamed for textural embellishment. First, I used my heat-activated Marvy Snow pen for the snowflakes. Then I used my glue pen to add some color-matched flocking: white on the snow, green on the cuffs, yellow on the collar, and purple on the ear-muff.

The boots are coated with Glossy Accents. The doily was sprayed with Tattered Angels glimmer mist, because I wouldn't bring myself to just leave it white! Everything is edged with a Copic marker (G07 / Nile Green).

Inspiration:
Stampin' Dymonz Scrap Shack Christmas Card Club: Make Your Own BP
Creative Inspirations Challenge #64: Xmas in July
2011 Christmas Card Challenge Week #33: Faith
Paper Cupcakes Magic Monday: Sketch
colourQ challenge #94: Tangerine Tango, Green Galore, Daffodil Delight, Rich Razzleberry + white

Stamps: First Taste of Snow by Karen's Doodles, Xmas Ticket by When the Scrap Hits the Fun, stash
Tools: Marvy heat tool, Fiskars papercutter, Tim Holtz scissors, HP printer & ink, Adobe InDesign, awl, hole punch
Other: ZipDry glue, ZIG glue pen, Marvy snow pen, Elmer's gel pen, Versamark watermark ink, Glossy Accents, doily from stash, Tattered Angels glitter mist, bakers twine from stash, embossing powders from Stampendous & Hero Arts, flocking from Martha Stewart, Recollections, & Stampendous
Copic markers: b0000, yr01, e11, e13, rv02, e37, e17, v06, v17, bv00, y06, y17, yr04, yr09, yg03, g07