December Crop Kit - Christingle

My son Andrew after the Christingle service outside St. Paulinus Church in Crayford. For several Christmases my three children loved to dress up to take part in the service. This particular photograph was taken in 1997. In fact this was one of my daughter Emily's memories in the Advent letters she is sending me, she remembers the first Christingle they attended when they were three. I snowed that weekend and so the photos taken in the graveyard were very atmospheric. I  have scrapped the photo with all three of them on that first year which I believe was 1995 several times, it has to be my favourite photo, her is is in black and white.

Back to the layout with Andrew the five year old shepherd! I went to the Paper Maze crop on Saturday and this month the kit was designed for us to create our own design. The kit contained beautiful three papers from Carta Bella's Christmas Day Collection - fast becoming a favourite line of papers of mine. The kit also contained two sheets of Bazzill, one in a deep, dark red and a white. There was ribbon, dew drops, gems, leaves, kraft tag, star beads, chipboard 'Merry Christmas' holly leaf ribbon and a Christmas rose.

In fact I still have all this to play with after making my layout, so I can easily make at least one more layout or several cards.

Vanessa had some dies, punches, embossing folders etc. all with a Christmas theme for us to use. I picked the Tim Holtz Alternation Sizzlets Strip - Snowflake Rosette Die.Which makes an assembled snowflake of approximately 3 1/2". I set about trying out this die and it wasn't as easy as it looks, but I mastered it in the end! I used 12" x 2" strips of the white Bazzill and ended up buying another sheet as I made a few errors (it really needs an extended spacer platform to cut evenly throughout the die) and needed some to mat my photo. 

In the end this is the method I found worked best.

1. Cut a snowflake from the strip of Bazzill.

2. Press the shapes out from the card, you end up with a small snowflake and the accordion shape.

3. Poke out the tiny diamond shapes that give the snowflake its pattern.

4. Accordion fold the long shape, I made mountain folds over the longer points.

5. Join the ends with some wet glue - It looks a bit like a very wide crown at this point!

6. I thought it would be a good idea to have a base to stick the rosette to and was going to cut some circles from scrap, but had a small pile of the snowflakes from the same die that I didn't plan to use so I added wet glue to the centre for the flat snowflake and arranged the accordion snowflake over this, it's tricky but you need to hold it in place for a few minutes until it's firmly held in place.

At this point it looks like this.

This is how it looks on the back. As I couldn't see what I was doing from the front, it is a bit off set, but it's not going to be seen so it's not a problem. If I was sticking this to the front this would be centered.

I used a snowflake from a Martha Stewart corner punch to cover the centre hole of my snowflakes, then added a flat backed pearl from the kit.

Then I added lots of glitter with my Ice Stickles. I repeated this five times to add a row of snowflakes across the layout, staggering them across the page above the reverse side of a piece of Carta Bella - Christmas Day - Ornaments cut to about 4" x 11 1/2", with the bottom corners rounded and the whole piece inked around the edges.

For the sixth snowflake which is at the top of the layout, I added a snowflake from the die and decorated this with flat backed gems from my stash. 

I would also like to try this die for the mini snowflake rosette- which is also available at Paper Maze 

I added my journalling to the tag in the kit and tied the string ties into a bow. 

I added the five glittery, red bead stars along the bottom panel along with the chipboard greeting. I painted the greeting with acrylic paint and then stained the letters with brown ink and the holly with red and green ink.

Thanks for looking.
Lynn x