Peace on Earth..

 This card very nearly didn't make the cut and I wasn't doing to post it, but hey, we can all make mistakes and this is one that didn't turn out anything like the vision of loveliness that was in my head, but there you go, that's crafting for you

I have a theory that I never stick to. If a card isn't going the way you imagined, you should really reach a point, quite quickly, where you rip it up, go and have a coffee and start again....

So I have had the new Tim Holtz falling trees embossing folder sitting on my desk for a couple of weeks, and also his Christmas word dies. I thought I would ink the embossing folder to get a faux letterpress look...

So the first attempt, I inked the wrong side of the folder. Next, I used a very harsh green ink, it looked terrible, then I did it again using distress inks and some pearlized water, forgetting that I was using ordinary cardstock instead of watercolour paper, so the card disintegrated into a soggy mess. This should have been my 'give up and have a coffee' moment, but no. Onward I pressed and eventually ended up with this rather muted watercolour type embossed image that I quite liked

Then came the fun with the word dies. Now the font on these is fabulous, and you get a whole load of sentiments in the set. They are very fine, and need waxed paper and a metal shim to make life easy, but the problem I had was that I found it impossible to look at all these little metal shapes and figure out what the word was. By process of elimination, I put aside the longer words like 'christmas' and 'Greetings', but however hard I tried to figure it out I couldn't make out what the other words were (apart from the little word 'on', that one was easy to identify), so had to cut the lot out. (I have since hit on the idea of marking the back of the metal with a sharpie so that I wont's have to do this again...)

But that idea didn't occur to me until much later, after I had cut out the lot in white, tossed the dies back into the package, then decided I really preferred black, the white was too wishy washy. So out came the dies again. Repeat the nonsense I describe above, cut in black, toss dies into package...

THEN I decided I needed two more cuts of each word so that I could layer them together for a chipboard look...

By this time, never mind the coffee, I was ready for a gin and tonic..

So here is a 'quick and easy' card that most definitely won't be on the mass production list. Perish the thought!

I hope that those of you who are planning spooky times involving lots of candy have a great time tonight

I'll be back from Yorkshire tomorrow with photos of my adventures there, see you then x