Cute L’il Reindeer!

Aloha, all!

     Already it's time for another Stampin' Up! Only Challenge!  The challenge this time is to make a project that features an animal – any animal!  The only caveat is that the project has to use ONLY products from Stampin' Up!

     If you look at my last post, you'll see the only stamps with mammals that I thought  I owned (love those dinosaurs!).  But my grandson's birthday was this past weekend, so I couldn't put off using the Dinoroar Stamp Set until today.  I thought I was going to have to go for the birds in my collection until I happened upon the Jolly Bingo Bits stamp set and there was another animal!  A reindeer!  Oh, and then I realized I owned other reindeer stamps, including the stamp in the Joyous Celebrations set in the Holiday Catalog and the new Christmas Deer in the 2012-2013 Catalog.

     But once I had that cute little guy from Jolly Bingo Bits in my head, I couldn't get it out.

     From the time I first looked at this stamp, I envisioned three little reindeer heads all in a row.  So my first project was to figure out how to get them all in a row without just a boring rectangle as the backdrop.  Now that we have so many framelits in all kinds of shapes, it was easy to find the shape from the Apothecary Accents Framelits collection to be the backdrop.  Ooops, not so easy!  The shape isn't quite long enough to fit three squares along the long side.  Not to worry, though!  It turns out that paper folds in half quite nicely, thank you!  And so I took the piece of Cherry Cobbler Card Stock that I was going to use for my base color, folded it in half  and placed the framelit with the long edge along the cut edges of the folded card stock and the fold just above the middle.  Here's a photo, as I'm not sure I'm getting my point across with words too well today!

     From the fold down to the bottom inside edge (the cutting edge) of the framelit is about 2-3/8" – certainly no shorter than that, but not too much longer either.  I did want to make sure that the shape fit on top of the various mats I wanted on the front of the card.  The last step to make sure this works is to align the cut edge of the paper perfectly with the outside edge of the card stock, or else you're going to end up with a shape that's not straight.  Then, once you cut the double layer of card stock, unfold the die cut piece and use a bone folder to press the fold out a bit.  The ribbon on my card covers the fold.  But even before that, you couldn't see very clearly where the fold was.

     Once I had the element with the reindeer on it done, I worked with my papers to try to make some interesting mat cuts – just because I was in the mood for it!

     The papers I used are from the Be of Good Cheer Designer Series Papers set.  I used Cherry Cobbler and Gumball Green Card Stock, along with a touch of Primrose Petals card stock, which seems to be a fun accent color for this paper set, even though it's not a part of it.

     The greeting is from Teeny Tiny Wishes, and I used my Stampin' Write Markers to color the letters and the dots below them before stamping on Very Vanilla Card Stock.

     I stamped the Reindeer using Chocolate Chip Classic Ink, punched them with the 1" square punch, and layered them on 1-1/8" squares of the three colors of card stock before adhering them to the die cut shape with Stampin' Dimensionals.  After I adhered that element to the card front, I wove the Gumball Green Stitched Satin Ribbon between the dimensionals adhering the middle reindeer and tied the bow to the side.  (A side note on those 1-1/8" squares:  I punched the card stock using the 1-1/4" Square Punch and then just trimmed 1/8" from the top and side of each of the squares.  It was much easier than trying to cut 1-1/8" squares from scratch!)

     Fun – and another Christmas Card done!  I am SOOO ready for sending out my Christmas Cards this year!  I hope you're getting there, too – and having as much fun as I'm having!