Chirstmas swap

I am in a Christmas card swap with some other stampers, so this week I am going to make a few Christmas cards and then decide on one to use for the swap.  This is the first one I made. It uses a stamp set from the  holiday mini called "The Sounding Joy".   I think this is a very pretty set, the font on the words is just gorgeous.  I chose to feature the "Let Earth receive her king" stamp.  I stamped the words in versamark on a piece of 3x3 vellum and embossed with silver embossing powder.  You have to be careful when you heat the embossing powder on vellum, go slowly so you don't scorch the vellum or make it curl.  I stamped a second piece of 3x3 whisper white with the stamp that has the lyrics of "Joy to the World" in a star shape. and layered that under the vellum paper.  You can still see the lyrics under the vellum, but they look very soft.  I wanted to use the new mini brads to attach the two 3x3 pieces together.  The mini brads are so cute and dainty.
I used to just eyeball where I wanted brads or eyelets to go, but a few years back I bought the Stampin' Up! Mat Pack and now can't live without it.  The Mat Pack comes with three pieces, a small grid board to use when hammering eyelets of doing other things that you want to protect your surface from, or just to line up your layers.  The second piece is a template for paper piercing, spacing eyelets, brads, buttons.   The last piece is a foamy piece that you put under the template when paper piercing.  You can see in the picture that I lined the cardstock up with the template to decide where to place my holes.   I then added the brads and matted the 3x3 pieces with a piece of 3 1/4 x 3 1/4 brushed silver cardstock.  To add some more texture I added some ruffles Cherry Cobbler seam binding ribbon.  To make the ruffles, I placed some sticky strip on
 the back of the brushed silver cardstock, and pinched and folded the seam binding ribbon along the sticky strip until I liked the way it looked.   I then added the image to my card base with dimensional stickers, or, as I call them in class, "puffies".   I folded my card a bit differently from a standard fold.  The base is 5 1/2 by 4 1/4 but I added another fold line to the front, so that when it opens, you can see the inside and the outside at the same time.  
The inside reads "Rejoicing with you in the birth of Christ our Lord, and wishing you all the blessings of His love." because really, that's what its all about.

Thanks for stopping by!

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