Welcome to the last Stamptastic Friends blog hop this year and this month we’d like to welcome Katie Drew to the design team too. The theme this month is using a card sketch for inspiration in our card making and I still have some Christmas cards to make for local friends. I designed the card sketch for the hop thinking it would be ideal for any card occasion.

Why using a card sketch is fun in cardmaking

Card sketches are just what you need when you need some creative inspiration, the crafter’s equivalent of writer’s block ! Although the sketch shows circles you can let your imagination go and just think of them as individual images that will build up. Your ‘greeting’ or ‘words’ could even be one of the circles.

Holly jolly Christmas card

My design process for the card was to make my central focus, aka the big circle on the sketch, the greeting “have a holly jolly christmas”. This greeting is from the annual catalogue stamp set , Christmas to remember. I took some black cardstock and white embossing powder to stamp with. When the emboss powder turns glossy white from the heat tool is still a magical cardmaking moment for me.

Adding the smaller circles

The layered holly leaves and berries represent the 3 smaller circles on the card sketch and I simply stamped and die cut these out from white cardstock. I like to see lots of white space on my cards but I did randomly stamped some of the tiny red dots around where the black circle would sit.

Then I used dimensionals to secure the black greeting circle in place before arranging the holly leaves and berries on top. A few swishes of wink of stella and some rhinestones were the only finishing touches required. A little batch of these are now made ready for last minute Christmas cards and as gift card holders!

Thank you so much for joining me today and do pop around and see what the other ladies are sharing in the hop, until next time….

Inky hugs, Carrie x