Festival of ornaments

Before I get to the crafty goodness I want to say that I hope you had a wonderful, safe Thanksgiving and holiday weekend. We went from about 61° F on Wednesday to cold winds and snow Thursday evening to a low of 12° F on Saturday. Definitely made me want to hide in my craft room and make cards all weekend, which I did as much as I could. Now, on with the show.

In the past few months, I've posted several card ideas using the Festival of Prints Designer Series Paper (DSP) stack from Stampin' Up!^®. (You can type "Festival of Prints" into the search box at the top of the right sidebar to see my previous posts.) I pulled that DSP out again this weekend and was busy creating Christmas and all-occasion cards. I made too many cards to share in one post, so I'll have a little "Festival of Prints parade" for the next couple of days. Leading the parade today is a series of cards made with the Holiday Ornaments Framelits dies.

Note: There are quite a few pictures in this post, so I kept them small. You can click on any of the pictures to see larger versions.

Supplies (all Stampin' Up!):
Stamps: Petite Pairs
Paper: Cherry Cobbler, Lucky Limeade, Island Indigo, Very Vanilla card stock; Festival of Prints DSP; sliver glimmer paper
Ink: Cherry Cobbler, Island Indigo
Accessories: Holiday Ornaments Framelits dies, Top Note die, Tasteful Trim die, 3/4" circle punch, Merry Minis punch pack, silver cord, rhinestones, Tombow Mono Multi liquid glue, Dimensionals, Mini Glue Dots

Aren't they fun? I started out by selecting four full sheets (and one partial sheet leftover from another project) from the Festival of Prints DSP stack. I wanted to do combinations of Lucky Limeade/Cherry Cobbler and Island Indigo/Early Espresso, so I chose the sheets with patterns on the front and back that would work with those combinations.

You can see how I arranged the Framelits dies to cut as
many shapes as possible at one time.

I started with one of the DSP pieces and placed as many of the Holiday Ornaments Framelits dies on it as I could, making several die cuts with one pass through the Big Shot. I repeated that process with each piece of DSP until I had a whole slew of ornaments. I sorted the die-cuts into groups of three or four, mixing and matching until I was pleased with the variety of ornament shapes, sizes and colors in each group.

I decided to use the same basic layout I used for my Ornament Keepsakes cards, so I die cut fourteen Top Note shapes from Very Vanilla card stock (seven for the card fronts and seven for inside the cards). Then it was time to embellish the ornaments. To make the silver glimmer paper ornament tops, I traced the tops of the die-cuts on the back of the glimmer paper, cut them out by hand and glued them to the ornaments. I also added punched circles or strips of glimmer paper to a few of the ornaments. (Tip: If you remove the thin plastic-like backing from the glimmer paper, then it is easier to punch shapes.)

To "hang" the ornaments, I adhered a small piece of silver cord to the back of each ornament and then adhered the ornaments to a Top Note die-cut. (I used Dimensionals to adhere one or two ornaments on each card.) I pulled the cord snugly over the top of the Top Note die-cut and adhered it to the back. Then I attached the Top-Note die-cut to the front of the card and stamped the sentiment. As a last-minute embellishment, I added a few rhinestones for just a little more sparkle.

I discovered with my first card not to place an ornament directly below the point in the top of the die-cut because the cord will have a tendency to slide to either side of the point. If you don't have silver cord, you could use baker's twine, embroidery floss, or crochet thread instead. You also could use a marker and simply draw the ornament hangers, or you could just skip the hangers, which is what I did with my previous Ornament Keepsakes cards.

There were still some good-sized scraps left after die cutting the ornaments, so I went to work with the ornament punch from the Merry Minis punch pack. I adhered five of the mini ornaments to each of the remaining Top Note shapes, stamped a sentiment, and adhered them inside the cards.

I enjoyed making these cards, but they took me much longer than I thought they would, mainly because I decided to add the glimmer paper ornament tops and cord to the ornaments. Although they still would have been cute cards without those details, I'm glad I took the time to add them.

Come back tomorrow for a few more Christmas card designs made with the Festival of Prints DSP stack. Thanks for stopping by!