New Year's Pine

  I have been totally MIA lately!  So sorry!  I had stamp club earlier this past week and then we got some electrical work done and since the electricians needed to make some holes to run the wires we have to have a drywall guy come and patch things up and then paint so my house has been in a state of disruption since Tuesday night (even more so than usual with 2 little boys!!).  That doesn't even count starting to decorate for Christmas which is pretty hard when you have furniture piled up in the front hall, rugs rolled up and extra chairs stacked up in the dining room.  I hope I can get back to stamping this week.  In the meantime I'm going to share one of the cards my stamping ladies made at club last week.

  I got my original inspiration from this card by Rita Wright.  Isn't that fabulous??  As soon as I saw it I knew I wanted to design something similar using the Crayon Resist technique and the pine tree from Lovely as a Tree.  I also wanted to incorporate the Simply Scored on for one of the elements.  This is what I came up with....what do you think?

  I used the color challenge from the Paper Players from a few weeks back.  The challenge was to use Riding Hood Red, Always Artichoke and River Rock.

  The card base is Always Artichoke.  Then I scored on the diagonal using my Simply Scored to get the cool diamond patterned background on the River Rock layer.  It's a bit hard to see on the photo but it's really cool in real life.  It's easy once you get into a rhythm.  If you look at your Simply Scored you will see a larger diamond pattern across the whole surface.  Just line up your cardstock with one of these diagonal lines and then start scoring...for this larger diamond pattern we scored every fourth line.  Once you score across the cardstock turn it the opposite way along one of the diagonal lines and score every fourth line again.  Super easy once you get started and you can make a smaller pattern just by scoring more often.

  Next, I stamped the pine tree in Always Artichoke ink on Naturals White cardstock.  Then using a white crayon drew some "snow" on the tree branches and under the tree.  Next, River Rock ink was sponged right over the tree.  To get the snow to stand out just buff over the whole image with a tissue or paper towel.  How cool is that?  The tree image was then mounted on a layer of Riding Hood Red.

    Finally for the accessories and finishing touches...I inked up the sentiment from Petite Pairs with a Riding Hood Red marker to omit the "and" and then stamped on White Naturals and punched it out with my 1 1/4" circle punch.  I did a bit of sponging as well with River Rock.  It was then layered with a 1 3/8" circle punched from Always Artichoke.  I poked a Vintage Trinket safety pin through the circles and added a knot of linen thread.  The whole thing is then adhered with a dimensional.

  So thanks to Rita for a wonderful inspiration card and to the Paper Players for a great color combination.  I made a few extra of these for myself as there is always someone who sends us a Christmas card that I didn't send one to (oops!).  How does that happen?  My Christmas card list has about 100 names on it!  That's like everyone I know so I don't know how some people don't get one!  I like to send Happy New Year's cards to those people so I always like to have a few ready to go right after Christmas!

  Thanks for looking!  Did you stamp today?

Stamps: Lovely as a Tree, Petite Pairs

Ink: Always Artichoke, River Rock, Riding Hood Red- marker


Paper: Always Artichoke, River Rock, Riding Hood Red, Naturals White

Accessories: Simply Scored, 1 1/4" & 1 3/8" circle punches, Vintage Trinket, linen thread, dimensional, white crayon (non-Stampin' Up!)