Holiday Cards

I made some Holiday Cards today as a gift for my Step Mom for her birthday- well her birthday was October 8th but I gave her an IOU for handmade cards. They were the project at the top of my list and my goal was to get them done this weekend so I can start all my Christmas projects next week. Luckily making a set where all the cards are mostly the same goes pretty quickly- once the design is settled- it is just a matter of "mass" production.This is the original design. I got some nice cardstock from a co-worker that I knew would be perfect. I needed the design to be pretty simple so I could make an entire set without breaking the bank. I looked at a couple of designs on some scrapbooking sites and came up with a simple snowflake design- not too Christmas-ey but still festive. This is the paper I chose. It is a handmade navy blue paper- very lightweight- with small gold tinsel throughout- that I got at a garage sale over the summer. So pretty. The pictures don't quite capture the navy color though.
My idea was to lightly stencil snowflakes randomly all over the paper- then use a snowflake stickeras a focal point on each panel (one large and two small). But when I finished the stenciling the snowflakes they seemed too contrastive (is that a word?). I tried to thin the paint but then the stenciling came out blurry. Then I had the idea of spraying some paint over the snowflakes. I used the spray top from Lily's hair detangler and some thinned out acrylic paint.
Here is the result. I think the paper came out amazing. I was very pleased with this spray experiment and I'll definitly use it again.

Then the assembly was relatively simple. After I cut the blue paper into the panels and mounted it on it's carstock- I put them together using some foam squares and circles to add some dimension.Finally I tested the Stamp "Happy Holidays" in a couple of inks to see which one would work best. I ended up choosing gold. I wanted to do blue but for some reason my blue ink does not work well with the new Acrylic stamps(rather than the old rubber kind). I think the gold stamp helped to tie in the tinsel in the paper though.Final Product. I originally was going to do some glitter at the edges like snow/wind blowing (you can kind of see it in the design picture) but I ended up making the card a little smaller and didn't have room for anything else. I think it would have actually been too busy with anything else since the Navy paper had a little more detail than I originally anticipated.