Canopy Crafts: December 2016

Sunday, December 11, 2016

Joyful Christmas Wishes PP325

Hi all--here we are at the last Paper Players challenge for 2016. After this week, we will take a break from blogging to enjoy the holiday! It's also our last challenge with our amazing Guest Designers. They have worked so hard all year, sharing their work with us. Linda, Coleen & Hannelie, I am going to miss you all--thank you for going above and beyond to work with us the whole year!

The fabulous Jaydee is our hostess for a color challenge and she's picked a favorite combination of mine...silver and gold! Are you singing along with Burl Ives in your head? I sure am! I love the contrast of cool silver with warm gold and find it adds instant elegance to any project.

I knew I wanted to create something with an embossed poinsettia for my project so I dug out a favorite retired set for today's card....Joyful Christmas. The card base is actually thick whisper white cardstock to which I adhered a piece of [retired] brushed silver cardstock. The whisper white panel was trimmed on an angle for a bit of interest and embossed with the Holly Textured Impressions folder.

The star of this card is the poinsettia. It is heat embossed in gold on vellum cardstock. I embossed two images so I could fussy-cut the inside petals and pop it up on dimensionals for added texture and depth. I heat embossed the leaves from the same set on whisper white cardstock with silver embossing powder and fussy-cut. The leaves are tucked under the flower and some pine boughs are interspersed after cutting from silver glimmer paper with the Christmas Pines thinlits. The final touch are some basic pearl jewels in the center.

Pretty easy, really--just a lot of embossing and fussy-cutting! I hope you will stop by and visit my friends on The Paper Players design team before our challenge closes on Friday, December 16th at Noon (PST). This will be my last post of 2016 as I take a bloggy break to enjoy the holidays with my family. Wishing you and yours all the warmth and love of the season...see you in 2017!

The Paper Players Design Team

Sunday, December 4, 2016

Snowflakes of Joy PP324

I may live in Florida now but I am a born-and-raised midwestern girl so as The Paper Players hostess for this week's theme challenge, I chose snowflakes! There is nothing like the sparkle and magic of new fallen snow; it blankets everything with quiet grace. I miss those first snowflakes...but certainly not the ones that fall in March, LOL!

For today's card, I was inspired by this tutorial for creating a beautiful winter night sky as well as Narelle's awesome sketch at Freshly Made Sketches:

I started with a layer of Shimmery White cardstock, die-cut a 2.75" circle and ran it through the Big Shot with the Softly Falling embossing folder. This embossing folder is so versatile--falling snow, champagne bubbles, water, confetti--it makes it all! It's a must-have folder.

To create the sky, I sponged a 3.5" x 3.5" piece of Whisper White cardstock all over with Tempting Turquoise. Night of Navy was added just to the top half and over that [retired] Blackberry Bliss deepens the Navy and turns it a lovely indigo. The water speckles, are just that...water flicked onto the ink with my fingertips. When dry they created a lovely snowfall effect. Scattered snowflakes from the Christmas Pines set were stamped in Night of Navy. I die-cut the sentiment from the Wonderful Wreath Framelits in Silver Glimmer paper. The letters were cut apart so I could add a snowflake--cut with the Starlight Thinlits--to the "o" in 'Joy".

I thought the inside needed some color so I sponged and spritzed another piece of Whisper White cardstock and stamped this lovely sentiment from Christmas Pines in Blackberry Bliss (I really miss that color!).

I hope you won't miss a change to play along with this fun theme this week. Or miss a change to check out the rest of the Design Team's beautiful inspiration at The Paper Players! Join us, if you can...have a great week, friends!