Aloha, all!
Today is the day for the biweekly Stampin' Up! Only Challenge at SUO Challenges.com. The theme for this challenge is to make something for Christmas that is "non-traditional." So a card with red and green Christmas ornaments was probably not the way to go. Great for me because, even though I've not yet made as many Christmas cards as I had done this time last year, I'm still becoming a bit weary of Cherry Cobbler and Old Olive! Coincidentally, the online Stampin' Up! Demonstrators group, Late Night Stampers, also has a challenge to make a card with anything but red or green. I'm not the only one tired of the color combo!
When I was a child, one of our traditions was to make Gingerbread Cookies and ice them to hang on our Christmas Tree. I don't think they were edible with the special recipe we used. And maybe we even used paint instead of icing – which may be why they lasted for the trip from the kitchen into the living room!
So a Gingerbread Cookie was the first thing that came to my mind. It didn't take too long for me to figure out that the Festive Flurry Stamp Set and the Festive Flurry Framelits Dies would be perfect for this. So I stamped the third largest Snowflake using Versamark on Chocolate Chip Cardstock, embossed it with White Stampin' Emboss Powder, and die cut it with the matching Framelit. I wanted it really to look like a cookie, and I couldn't make it look just like I wanted simply by using Stampin' Dimensionals. I found some lightweight cardboard and punched 4 of the snowflakes out with the framelit. I had to do each individually because the framelits are not that deep and cut only one layer at a time something this thick.
Once I had them all cut, I glued all of the cardboard pieces together and then used my Chocolate Chip Stampin' Write Marker to color the edges of the "cookie." Finally, I glued the stamped and embossed layer to the cardboard layers. Now I really had a cookie!
With Chocolate Chip as my first "non-traditional" color for this card, I needed something else. A Crumb Cake background nicely accented the darker brown of the cookie. But I still wanted something other than the neutral colors AND I wanted a color that had some matching ribbon that would go well with this card. Primrose Petals fit the bill nicely, with it's pretty Stitched Satin Ribbon.
Now about the sentiment layer. The five lines that I used for this card are the last lines of one of the stamps in the More Merry Messages Stamp Set. That set is not in the current catalog, but it's still available to purchase if you'd like. If you'd like to check out all the other fun stamps in this set, just click here.
To make the small Primrose Petals mat, I first cut the Whisper White Cardstock stamped image using the smallest of the Labels Collection Framelits. Then I traced the negative image onto a piece of Primrose Petals Cardstock and hand-cut the shape just outside of the line that I'd drawn. I flipped the cardstock over and that became the mat.
The final set of pieces in this card are the three little ornaments "hanging" from the same ribbon as the cookie shape. I punched these with the ornament shape from the Merry Minis Punch Pack, another product that's not in the current catalog, but is still available for purchase.
Do you have some ideas for a "non-traditional" Christmas project? If so, be sure to enter it in the SUO Challenge!
