Nordic Noël

My cards this week feature products from Gummiapan and are cased from tags I saw on their Pinterest feed, which prompted my purchase in the first place.  They are a Swedish company but, very helpfully, if you scroll to the bottom of the page, you can view the website in English.

To start, I die cut two Snowflake Circles and stamped them with the Worn-out Calendar December stamp and grey ink.  I didn’t want the stamp to go on the ‘arms’ of the snowflake so I used the negative of the die-cut as a mask when inking the stamp.

I mounted these onto grey stitched circle die-cuts.

For one, I die-cut the small and big Nordic Reindeer and shaded them using brown and gold inks and brushes.  I used a tiny make-up brush to add the gold onto the antlers and tail.  Blending ink onto the die-cuts can get really messy so I find it easier to position the cuts into the negative spaces whilst inking.

For the second card, I used the Jumping Gnome dies and blended red ink onto the clothing, coloured the gloves and boots with a black marker and the nose a pale pink.  The beard was cut from some flocked card.  A little shimmer was added to the outfit with a clear Wink of Stella pen.

The grey circles were mounted onto white stitched circles and I wanted a curved sentiment on them.  It’s easy to do this if you have some skinny photopolymer sentiment stamps.  Use the circle, or the negative of the die-cut, put a clear block over the top then arrange the stamp onto the block, following the line of the curve, then turn over and stamp where required.

Next, I needed a background for the cards so I used some red 5” square card bases.  They looked a bit plain so I used the new Lawn Fawn Snowflake Background stencil and some Lawn Fawn Pearl stencil paste for one and Tim Holtz Ranger Opaque Grit Paste for the other.  I should have used some temporary adhesive behind the stencil for the Pearl paste as it was very smooth and seeped underneath.  The Grit Paste is thicker so didn’t ooze under the stencil.

The Grit Paste was my favourite and gave great dimension to the pattern.

To finish the cards, I used some foam tape behind some elements of the cards.