MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!!!

CARD COVER I cut out the left stem of the H.

This year I decided to go with a tri-fold card on off-white card stock. The idea for the cover (DELIGHT) with the cut-out  is straight from Barbara Close's workshop http://www.bcdezigns.com/index.html that she taught for http://edmontoncalligraphicsociety.ca/ this past fall. She'd created a Happy Birthday card for us to doodle, then had us cut out the stem of one of the letters, so we could view the inside where we painted an image.

 

Inside - bottom third folded up

 http://www.zenspirations.com/ was the stimulus for the inside of this year's card. Joanne Fink's beautiful banners are amazing, and a great guide to practice my doodles from in order to create the inside banner on my own card. You know what they say...if you really want to learn, "copy the masters" and while mine is not a direct copy, I did use many of her strokes and shapes in figuring mine out. This new kind of  Zen like doodling has been so much fun fiddling with in the evenings while sitting in front of the TV.

I'm not too happy with the strokes I added around the decoration; way too overdone! Of course I was in such a hurry to produce enough for the guild party that I didn't realize it at the time. For later cards (still on my table, BTW) I 'erased' most of that in Microsoft Paint.

For matching envelopes, I'd scanned the banner from the inner top of my card; and to create a smaller version, opened it with Microsoft Paint & "erased", then "cut" and "paste"d some bits here & there.

 Both card and envelope were scanned and printed on our home printer.

 

For the colour highlights I started with Prang metallic watercolours but found that time consuming so moved on to Sakura Gellyroll Stardust gel pens. LOVE them!!!

 

 

 

I got mine through http://www.quietfiredesign.ca/ an excellent calligraphic art online order shop right here in Canada. Some of the cards got a dab or 2 or 3 of 'Studio g' glitter glue, but I preferred the cleaner (and less time consuming) look of self-adhesive mini diamonds. 

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!!! Enjoy yourselves!