Lets Get Hopping #48 -CASE it for Christmas

Welcome to our Let's Get Hopping blog hop, where each month a group of demonstrators from around the world, work on a theme. 

I'm Rachael Merrick, from Queensland in Australia; welcome to my blog!

This month the idea was to CASE a previous card or project but make it Christmas.  This was a fun one to do, looking back through my cards and making a choice of which one to use because I have plenty of favourites.  I chose this birthday card, using some of my favourite DSP and the ever fun Birthday Chick stamp. 

I took inspiration of the strip pieced DSP and instead of using it for the background, I created a matted central piece for the card.  

I started by cutting half inch strips and layering them over a pre cut piece of cardstock.  

Next I wanted to add interest to the background so clustered all the images I could from the Merriest Moments set onto a larger block then using VersMark ink, stamped the entire Garden Green background.  

I then sponged garden green to the edges to give it more dimension.  Don't you love how effective this is!  

I trimmed back the strips block and matted it with Real Red cardstock before adding a sentiment and some embellishments stamped from the same stamp set.  I also cut some Evening Evergreen ribbon in half to be able to add a dark green bow element to finish off the card.

The SaleABration Be Dazzling papers, although no longer available, really had to make an appearance on this card as a nod to the original too but could easily be replaced with the red or silver foiled cardstock currently in the mini catalogue. I used my real red blender pen to colour the paper to match in better too - a great tip!

Like most of my Christmas cards, this one has a real WOW impact in real life, lots of embellishments and things to look at.  I've used plenty of dimensional dots too so that there is layer upon layer.  

TIP: when using sentiments, ink up your stamp with one colour then use a scrap to 'stamp off' a few times on only some of the words then use a dauber to add a second colour to the cleaner words.  Looks lovely when stamped.  

Thanks for popping by my blog for the hop, I hope you have found something to inspire you.  

You are now off to  the next blog with Tanya..... she is bound to have something fabulous waiting for you.  

Happy Stampin,

Rach xx